Jacob Lay

Background

About Jacob Lay

One of my core memories is working with friends in High school in the early using HTML4 to draft a website for my History and Thought class around our favorite renaissance painter. It's was an awful blur of bright neon colors, poorly aligned pictures and Comics Sans. While I'll never look back on that document that we created in Notepad and think "this is a fine example of good coding", I will always remember it for introducing me to my first taste of creating something digitally. Since then I have taken many jobs, with many titles. Sometimes I was called Manager, Team Leader, Specialist and a few more, but I could never find a job, role or title that fit perfectly or felt "right". I found myself always dabbling in some additional code languages in curiosity or to assist myself in my current role but it never went anywhere more than that. Until I was afforded the opportunity to join a code boot camp with Merit America. Having been able to fully embrace new languages (Java, Java-script, SQL and more) I have found why that quirky, awful webpage has held such valuable space in my head. I absolutely love coding, and creating items in the digital space. While studying I worked on creating my first application for Black Jack on my own just for practice, and it was amazing. There was no classes beyond organization, no objects since I had used a 2D Arrays for structure, but at the end of the day - it worked. The program followed my logic for the dealer, cards were removed as dealt, it kept memory of what was used and most important - you could *play it*. Obviously now I can look back and think of a much better and faster solution while maintaining Object Oriented Programming to create a deck of cards than how I did or how to solve many of the issues I faced trying to read a XML of bet history but I keep that program as is to remind myself that this is how far I have come, and to show how much farther I can go. I cannot wait to pursue my passion and show you what I can do!