The Beard has a myriad of skills. I’ve documented some of them here. Some he’s acquired in the Boy Scouts. Some on his mission. Some from varied education and vocational experiences.

First he was going to be a pilot.

Then he was going to be a professor of religion or seminary teacher.

Then he was going to open a Rita’s Italian Ice in St. George with his favorite mission companion. {Fun Fact: their mission president beat them to the punch and opened the first Utah Rita’s in Midvale a few weeks ago! This is an old photo from when we went to the Grand Opening. Go try it. It will change your life.}

Then he was working on a history degree, planning on going to law school afterwards.

Then he did BYU’s Media Music program for a while.

But none of these were his THING. 

Thankfully it wasn’t that he was lazy or stupid – he’s so smart and could do ANYTHING, and has tried tons of options. It was just that he honestly didn’t know what to do. Did that make us feel better? NOOOOOOOO! Just kidding. It did. A little.

But now we can laugh and laugh because HE FIGURED IT OUT. The Beard’s favorite thing to say is “I’m realllllllly good at the internet.” And he super is. He’s always been so interested in all things technology, and he’s thought about doing that for a long, long time. His last two jobs have been SEO and he liked it, but knew he wanted to do something more challenging.

Finally, this last spring he came across these boot camps that teach developers how to code in Ruby (don’t ask me what it is or what it does, all I know is it’s a coding language that Twitter and other cool, modern websites are built with). They are intensive 3-4 month programs for 8+ hours a day, and the closest one was in San Francisco. He started preparing and we started planning for it, thinking he’d apply this fall and who knows after that. I didn’t love the idea of sending my husband to San Fran for months with a bunch of computer nerds.

The DevPoint Labs Development Bootcamp just fell right into his lap. And by that I mean we’d been praying for insight and guidance and Heavenly Father answers prayers and has a plan for us. Several big companies in Utah teamed up to start a bootcamp just like the ones in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and other big cities, aimed at training developers in the new coding languages that tech companies DESPERATELY need.They have multiple companies lined up to hire people right out of this program, including Zappos. Which would mean discounted shopping for me. Obvs I’m excited about that. He’s excited too – spending lots of time looking at jobs in St. George and Phoenix, practicing coding nonstop and networking with his program peeps. You can read The Beard’s Student Spotlight for the program here.

I could bore you with the details of how every tiny thing fell into place – the meetings, the random connections he had in the industry, paying for the program, getting the hours off at work he needs to go to this program (afternoons/evenings until 8 pm EVERY NIGHT. Yikes.), even the people who are already lining up interviews with him for when he completes the program in December. Suffice it to say that I’ve never seen him more sure of and excited about anything in his life, except maybe the release of The Hobbit last winter.  This is IT, you guys.

He starts today, and I couldn’t be more proud of him. He’s going to work almost full time at his job, go to class until 8 each night and most of the day on Saturdays, AND deal with crazy little me on his off hours. Here comes 2.5 months of super intensity! That means a lot less of this:

So anyone who wants to be my gym/cupcake/library/Netflix/girls night buddy to fill those now husbandless hours – I’m taking applications at dholdy{at}gmail{dot}com. I won’t make you cuddle with me and Glen Coco unless you want to.