Every Peace Corps volunteer serves 27 months: three months of training, and then two years at your post. My post happened to be one of the most remote Peace Corps sites in the whole world (according to one of our Peace Corps Mongolia directors), in Duut Soum, Khovd.

Duut is a village of about 1800 people, and if you’re getting there from outside of Mongolia you have to fly to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, then take a two propeller airplane 4-5 hours west to Khovd Province, then go to the open air market, and flag down a jeep full of what will probably be 12 - 16 people that hopefully happens to be going to Duut. And then after that arduous journey, you’d find my ger (yurt) at the end of one of the six roads in the village. This is the setting for the start of my journey into programming.

Throughout my time in Duut, I was an English teacher and English teacher trainer, meaning that I helped the two local English teachers make their curriculum a little more focused on the students, and a little more critical thinking based. About halfway through my service I realized two things - 1. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I came home from Mongolia and 2. I loved to build processes, products, and solve puzzles both with other people and by myself. Then one of my best friends, Michael Canlas, told me about his success in going through a coding bootcamp in Boulder, Colorado, and from then on out, the rest was destiny for me.

I got on freecodecamp.org, taught myself the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, applied to the seven month (which was unique back in 2015) Frontend Engineering program at Turing School of Software and Design in Denver, and never looked back. Fun fact, during my interview to get into Turing, I had to tell my interviewer that I was sorry if he heard howling in the background because our village had been having a problem with wolves at the time.

Since my time in Mongolia, I’ve never forgotten where my journey began, and I strive to use my unique background everyday, which may seem incongruous since what the hell does writing code have to do with burning dung and coal in Mongolia while surviving -40F winters, am I right? Well what I do use everyday is an empathy for my fellow teammate, I lean on the skills I used working with my teachers in Mongolia when pair programming or striving to write human readable code. When I get frustrated or blocked, I sit back, and take my time to solve the things, which is what I was forced to do so many times during those fateful two years. And ultimately, it just comes down to having an endless well of patience, understanding, and flexibility, all of which serve me well in the fast paced world that we live in now during product development life cycles.

I hope this story has been interesting those of you that have read it and I’d be happy to answer any more questions about my background and story of how I went from Peace Corps Mongolia to Senior Software Engineer in a couple years at any time.