About

My heroes are the hackers, the builders, the makers… those who dream of making the world more efficient through ones and zeros.

I’ve been reading Hacker News almost every day since 2010. Some of my favorite books include: “Hackers and Painters”, Steven Levy’s “Hackers”, “Founders At Work”, and “Without Their Permission”. I’ve read all of PG’s essays.

With over a decade of tech industry experience, I’ve worked at massive publicly traded tech conglomerates, mid-sized firms, and small Silicon Valley-based startups. I’ve learned a ton about the customer side of the industry, working in roles including support, sales, account management, etc. Working alongside engineers and technical C-level execs has taught me how to communicate customer feedback and bugs to dev teams and how to translate engineer-speak back to customers.

But I wasn’t happy. I still had this burning desire to become one of the makers. It took me nearly half a decade of many false starts and wrong turns, but through sheer willpower, I eventually learned software engineering. Along the road toward mastery, I had to learn how to learn. I had to learn about the art and science of self-discipline, how there’s no such thing as natural-born talent, and how anyone can be successful due to insane amounts of hard work.

Beginning in January 2020, I was a student at Launch School where I utilized the techniques of Mastery Based Learning to help me along the road towards mastery of the fundamentals of software engineering. After 1700+ hours of studying over 3.5 years while still working at my day job, I finished Launch School’s core curriculum in the summer of 2023. Today, I’m proficient in Javascript, Mongo, Express, React, JSX, Node, Ruby, Sinatra, jQuery, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, SQL, Postgres, APIs, & Google Apps Script.

You can follow me on LinkedIn, GitHub, StackOverflow, Medium, and Codewars. You can also email me at weston(at)westonludeke(dot)com.