Hi, my name is Mitchell Lagaras; but I guess you've been seeing that a lot on this site. Here's where I'll be sharing my thoughts, teaching and learning in public, and helping out people in this corner of the internet. I'm wanting to use this as a medium not only to share tech advice, but as a way to organize my thoughts and hold my learning accountable somewhere in the public eye.

Teaching isn't totally new to me, and you'll have probably seen that in the "About" page (here). I taught French and Programming with Python among a myriad of other subjects. I really spready myself thin in terms of what I was teaching, but I was having a great time, so I was really torn when I had to find a new career.

While it was my first step into the workforce after university, my academic formation was actually primarily in linguistics, not teaching per se. I didn't plan on teaching forever, and I always saw my role at the school as a stepping stone to another in the periphery of linguistics. So, when my wife and I discovered we would soon have another mouth to feed, sad as I was to leave the school, a career change wasn't too unexpected. The question then became "Where to?"

While in undergrad, my academic advisor and mentor clued me in to the growing field of computational linguistics, which had much to do with math and less to do with the cognitive sciences that I had fallen in love with over the course of my studies. Also, I didn't know how to write code and didn't think I would be able to effectively learn it since I hadn't started at a young age. Looking back, it's pretty clear how big of a misconception that was, but at the time, computers were pretty novel to me and I didn't know what was typical.

In any case, I remembered her telling me that if wanted a fruitful career in linguistics as well as a solid means to provide for my family, that computational linguistics would be the way to go. I eventually found my way onto freeCodeCamp, and was led down the path of web development, loving every second.

It wasn't a straight shot to completion, though. There was a fair share of uncertainty and at times I thought of just getting an altrnative resident teaching license so I could teach in public schools and make a bit more. But when I started to explore my options more seriously, I felt that I could make it work; so, I enlisted for a software development job in the US Air Force (at the same base where my wife works), finished up the freeCodeCamp certifications that I thought would be most useful, and started freelancing.

After my first couple clients, I decided to solidify the business practice as an LLC. Now, I'm building up my portfolio and leaving a trail of happy customers so that during my training I can start gearing up for government contracting. Until then, I'm here turning ideas into code trying to provide for my little yet growing family.

Hopefully, you can expect a new post once a week or so. If I happen to find some more time on my hands than usual, there might be more. I plan on giving general advice in addition to quick tech tutorials. Every time I spend too long a chunk of time futzing with a new technology whose documentation seems unintuitive to me, I think, "I should just document a quick how-to when I finally figure this out!" So that's probably where I'll be starting.

In the meantime, please don't hesitate to offer suggestions for the site or for blog posts that you might be interested in reading, or a subject you're wanting to learn more about. I might happen to know something about it. Until next time,

~ Mitchell