Flatiron School AEA Scholarship Winner Chris Callahan Tells All!

New York's Flatiron School changes lives by training adults (and high school students) in the skills they need to launch careers in web development. As you'd expect, we at An Event Apart are pretty keen on the school and its mission. To support them, we offer occasional AEA scholarships to selected Flatiron school students, enabling them to deepen their web education by attending all three days of An Event Apart in a city of their choice. Chris Callahan is one such student—a lucky AEA scholarship recipient, and a fascinating character in his own right. We recently got a chance to sit down with Chris and find out a little something about what makes him tick.

Tell us a little about yourself, and what you like to do.

I'm currently working as the lead front-end developer at Standard Analytics, helping to build a platform for scientific publishing on the web. In my free time, I like to learn different programming languages. Most recently I've been interested in getting up to speed with ES6, and playing around with ClojureScript. Outside of tech, I'm interested in China, and lived there for about three years. Now that I'm back in the US, I'm trying to keep up my Chinese language skills, and am still searching for the perfect bowl of spicy noodles.

Three years in China? That sounds like a fantastic story. Tell us more!

I did a “study abroad” semester in Shanghai during college. It was an amazing experience, and a great first exposure to China. The language, culture, and history are all fascinating and the food is unbelievable. I felt like I had more to see, and I was also determined to become fluent in Chinese, so, after graduating from college, I went back—this time to Xi'an, home of the Terracotta Warriors. I ended up spending about three years there, first teaching English, and later doing editing and translating.

I loved living in China. It's a wildly different country than the US, and, while living there, I was surprised by new and unexpected things on pretty much a daily basis. I had the opportunity to travel to a number of places in China, to meet lots of Chinese people, and to try local dishes from all over. The food in China is truly amazing, and it's one of the things I miss most about China. There's a huge variety when it comes to food in China—every region has its own cuisine—and in my opinion it's night and day when compared to Chinese food in the US.

One of the interesting things I learned after living in China for a couple years, studying the language and history, and meeting a ton of people, is how traditional Chinese culture actually is. While China is making lots of progress and becoming more international in recent years, it still has a deeply traditional culture that continues to influence daily life in China today. On the other hand, as a foreigner living in China, I was treated very kindly. I had the privilege of being one of the few, or even the first, non-Chinese person that many people I met there had the chance to talk to, and I was surprised at how genuinely curious the Chinese people I met were about what's going on in the world.

That's awesome! So what brought you to the Flatiron School?

When I was over in China, I ended up working at a large tech company doing documentation-related work. mostly editing technical documents, but some translating and other tasks as well. After spending many hours working on localizing software and web UIs at that company, I started to get interested in what was going on behind the scenes, and to see why the engineers there were always saying that certain parts of the UI “couldn't be changed.” It couldn't be that hard, right?

I started plowing through tons of online resources, and teaching myself how to code and build websites. After doing this for six months in my free time, I realized I enjoyed programming a lot more than the job I was working at, so I started considering how I could switch careers and get paid to do web development. Around this time, my brother had started at his first job as a developer, after finishing a three-month programming boot camp at the Flatiron School. He gave it a high recommendation, and I could tell the school was a place where people who were seriously motivated to become developers went to learn from passionate instructors.

I applied, got accepted, and moved to New York just over a year ago to start the class and my new career as a software developer.

What was your favorite thing about Flatiron?

Flatiron helped show me how coding can be a creative process, and helped get me to a place where I'm comfortable learning whatever I want to going forward. Towards the end of the 12-week program at the Flatiron School, we had a week-long independent project. This was us “flying solo” for the first time, after spending the previous two and a half months racing through the basics of full-stack web development. My project partner and I were able to get our basic site, an aggregator for blog posts written by Flatiron students, up and working in just a few days. Then we started playing around—adding new features, trying to push ourselves to pick up new tricks with JavaScript, implementing certain techniques or styles we liked on other websites, and more. Hacking away on that project was a blast, in particular because at that point I knew I could do it without a tutorial or coaching, but rather by just following where my interest led me.

What's next for you?

I want to keep building cool things, improving my UI design skills, and learning more about technology. I feel like I'm at a point in the programming learning curve where I'm finally able to see the big picture instead of struggling just to get a foothold. As a result, I'm getting more in tune with the creative process behind coding and building projects, and this is something I want to explore more deeply. There are also a lot of interesting things going on in the front-end development world right now that I'm looking into more and more. New frameworks and languages like React, ClojureScript, and Elm are pushing the boundaries of UI development, and making the development experience a lot nicer. It's exciting to learn new ways to approach the big challenges of building user interfaces and to try to think of some new approaches myself.

What are you looking forward to most at AEA DC?

I'm really excited about “A Day Apart” on accessibility with Derek Featherstone. Making information accessible is one of the core principles of the web, and I'm looking forward to learning more about how to make the web apps I'm working on more accessible for all people. Also, I must admit that I'm pretty much a complete novice when it comes to design. I do, however, know how valuable good UI design can be in building for the web, so I'm looking forward to learning a ton from the speakers and other design-minded attendees!

Thanks, Chris. You are a student apart. We look forward to seeing you at An Event Apart!