How does one go from working in finance and playing soccer to becoming a NASA coder? Ask Deep Tailor, a young man originally from Kenya who pushed himself to the top of his class at App Academy and ended up reaching for the stars.

Always interested in creating things and taking them apart, Deep decided to pursue a puzzle-filled programming career a bit later, at 26, than many of his colleagues. But the full story of how he got there and succeeded is really interesting.

A Desire for Something More

Deep Tailor attended Purdue University for his undergraduate degree, studying finance and playing on the men’s soccer team. While he was there, he believed he’d go into finance because people in his family were also financiers. He worked as a wealth management advisor for Northwestern Mutual right after college, but soon realized he didn’t have a passion for it.

I switched to programming because I always loved to tinker with software/hardware. I liked to work on computers but never thought I had it in me to make a career out of it…I gave web development a chance and have not looked back since.”

Tailor wanted the coding bootcamp experience because he came to believe it would give him the personal boost he needed to fully dive into a software engineering career. His research into the various bootcamps