Equipped to Build: Julian's Path from Mainframes to Software Engineering

Julian has always been the person who figures out how the machine works. He spent his Air Force career deep in electronics and computing — mainframes, switching systems, the large hardware that kept things running — and he picked up IT on the side, as a hobby, back when the service was still scrambling to build it. "They were basically like, where are all the people to build our IT," he says. "And they'd just put us there." He had a little programming in the mix, never as much as he wanted. What he wanted, all along, was software engineering. He just hadn't found the right on-ramp yet.

By the time he did, he was already retired and already teaching himself. The question wasn't whether he could learn to code — he was doing it — it was how to get there fastest. He weighed a computer science degree. He watched coding boot camps become a real option. Then he found Code Platoon.

Before Code Platoon, Julian enrolled at another boot camp — one of the most popular at the time — and used its seven-day opt-out window to look under the hood. What he found made the decision for him: a curriculum years out of date and a culture he describes without hedging as toxic.

"I was actually doing well at it," he says. "And I was like, this place is horrible, and it's only going to get worse." He trusted what he saw and walked. A classmate who stayed quit a week later and lost the refund. "That was one of those things where, if somebody told it to me, I wouldn't have believed it. I had to see it for myself."

Code Platoon was the opposite in every direction that mattered.

"It was relevant. The material was current. Everything was kept up," he says. "It was a very pleasant environment — you couldn't find a better one, honestly. Challenging, but not unrealistic. Not the old mindset of, if you just badger somebody they'll perform better. That has the opposite effect." He credits a lot of the climate to the people in the room. "Being mostly prior military probably has a lot to do with it. That climate is just better."

He went through with the Lima platoon in 2020, fully remote, right as the world shifted online — which suited him exactly. Julian had always wanted one-hundred-percent remote work, and the cohort proved he could thrive that way.

The clearest verdict on the training came six months into his first job.

"At the six-month point I was like, wow, I literally used everything they taught me," he says. "There was nothing where I thought, yeah, I never used that. It was a perfect match." Just as valuable was what the program taught him about learning itself. Code Platoon couldn't cover every technology in the field — no program can — so it taught him how to acquire new ones on his own. "I was able to be autonomous in picking up new skills. That was part of it too."

His personal project tells you everything about how he thinks. Frustrated that Recreation.gov held a wealth of national-park data but surfaced little of it, Julian built a friendlier front end he called Scout Out. Download the whole database, filter parks by whatever criteria mattered, pull up photos, generate something like a brochure for an area, link it to Google Maps for directions, and surface which campsites were actually open instead of booked out for six months.

"I just wanted something better," he says. "Tell a computer to find what I'm looking for and give me a short list. It was something I'd personally use, so I made it." It was practice, too — building a database, talking to it, layering skills on top of skills. "Get the fundamentals down pat, and then you can build on that. That's what they gave you. Everything you need to know and nothing you don't."

On teams, Julian gravitates to a role he's grown to love. "Pretty much anywhere I go, I fall into teaching and mentoring, whether I want it or not," he says. It's a role he discovered in the military and was surprised to find deeply gratifying — and one that keeps his own edge sharp. "Explaining something to somebody is the only way you really know if you know it. Sometimes I catch myself going, wait, I thought I knew that — let me go back and make sure before I tell you anything."

He has a whole philosophy about who belongs on a strong team, and it runs directly counter to ego. He wants mixed experience levels, on purpose. "Somebody totally new has a perspective that hasn't developed blind spots yet. They'll see stuff more experienced people miss," he says. "That's where you get a gestalt — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If everybody thinks the same way, now you've got blind spots." He holds himself to that standard, too. During the cohort, he'd tell classmates not to measure themselves against him, because he'd walked in with a head start. "I have a lot of respect for people starting from nothing and reaching real proficiency in a few months. Not as a hobbyist — proficient enough to apply for a job and do the job. That's the hard part."

The job search is where his resilience showed most plainly, and he's candid about why.

By his own description, Julian leans pessimistic and knows the pull of self-doubt — a pull the surrounding chorus of "the market is brutal right now" only strengthens. What steadied him was Career Services. He worked mostly with Rich — one half, with Katherine, of the team he leaned on — for interview prep and, just as importantly, for the encouragement to keep going.

"It's really easy to think, I'm not good enough, I'll never get this," he says. "Seeing that other people are doing this just fine — there's no reason I can't be one of them — that was encouraging." He also arrived with a weapon most new grads don't have: he already knew how to write. Years of drafting military performance reports, plus his own diligence, had made him a genuinely strong resume writer, and Code Platoon's heavy investment in resumes and interviewing sharpened it further.

His first job came through the alumni Slack channel — a listing another grad posted, that Julian happened to spot and pounce on. It was Hologram, a Chicago company that deliberately recruited boot camp graduates. "Entry-level coders with expert adulting skills," he says, quoting their pitch with obvious affection. He took on an ambitious project there and it landed well. When the company later lost its two largest customers and had to downsize, he didn't survive the second round of layoffs — and he refuses to read that as a verdict on himself. "That comes with the territory going for startups," he says, matter-of-fact. He's been in three of them.

What he says next is the quiet headline of his whole career: getting cut didn't slow him down. "I haven't had a hard time getting jobs," he says. "I've never had to do more than about thirty applications before I got interviews and an offer." The jobs after the first came largely through the network he'd built — one was a former manager who simply wanted him back. "If you do well at your job, people want to hire you when they move on." His take on the "I applied to three hundred jobs and heard nothing" refrain is bracing and self-assured: "No — you're doing something wrong somewhere. Diagnose it and fix it."

Six years out, Julian is still doing the thing Code Platoon taught him to do: learning on his own.

He was never an early adopter of AI — "it really had to prove itself" — but he's arrived at a clear-eyed conviction about it. Used well, with the fundamentals underneath and the discipline to check its work, "it's a force multiplier, for sure." Used blindly, it's a trap. He's watched newer engineers hand off half-finished work with a shrug of "well, this is what the AI said," and he sees exactly what that costs. "All you've done is shift the burden onto someone else to figure out if it even works. This is a tool. You don't swing a hammer around blindly and hope — you need to know where the nails go."

So he's teaching himself the hard version: running models locally on his own hardware, writing prompts good enough to refactor entire libraries rather than autocomplete a snippet. "That gives you speed," he says. "I'm building this thing, and I want to leverage AI fully. How do I do that? That's what I'm teaching myself right now."

He credits Code Platoon with handing him the base and then getting out of his way. "They gave you the fundamentals, and you can build whatever you want after that," he says. "Nothing is stopping you. You're equipped to do that."

Julian has been proving that point ever since.