Makers Academy – Taking the red pill

In December last year, I decided that a change would do me good. After a decade in finance, I have followed my technolust onto a twelve-week, intensive, coding boot camp at Makers Academy (MA) in London’s achingly trendy tech-city. As a modest but well-worn collection of suits glare at me from the wardrobe, I slop-on a pair of jeans and prepare for life outside my known universe.

“I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is cool.” - ++The Mentor++

I have been interested in technology for as long as I can remember, tinkering, breaking, building, and learning. Many of my earliest memories involve tech, whether spending hours in DOS trying to make the screen on my Amstrad flash different colours, making an AM broadcast circuit or building websites back when CSS was still a pipe-dream and one edit meant changing every page on the server. One thing these experiences had in common was a ‘WOW’ moment - ‘did I just make that’?! That feeling has never gone away.

Not-so bleeding-edge technologies circa my childhood

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” - Desiderius Erasmus

Apart from some shop-hopping (due to unforeseen circumstances), I was lucky enough to spend my years in finance with the same fantastic team of roughly a dozen individuals, who allowed me the freedom to learn and experiment with code, solving problems, developing solutions and ultimately (I hope) improving our product. I usually gained the most satisfaction from using code to manipulate/arrange/present disconnected data; information basically hidden in plain sight. Something stirred inside.

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones” - John Cage

I have watched from the sidelines with envy as the tech industry evolved. Technology has become affordable, pervasive and disruptive across industries. Digital information is everywhere. I have witnessed it disrupt finance and even challenge the fundamental economics of capital allocation. I am joining MA to learn to code but what most excites me is that I am joining an industry with a completely different attitude to change and outlook (I think) about what is possible. It’s an industry I can longer afford to ignore.

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” - Morpheus

So I decided to take the red pill. Today I start a new life. I am extremely open-minded about where MA takes me. I remain deeply curious about the tech sector but then there are also plenty of things left in finance that need disrupting and I have some ideas of my own. Let’s see how deep it goes…