As a U.S. Army combat arms infantryman and an expert in intelligence work, Kevin Lee was trained to think about how to look for a threat. During his deployment to Afghanistan earlier this decade, he said he studied areas of operation to determine where possible danger came from and to come up with solutions to mitigate those threats. It wasn’t totally surprising, then, that when he transitioned to civilian life he became a software engineer with a focus on security.

As an in-house developer at the multimedia publishing company Condé Nast, home of Vanity Fair and Wired, Kevin now fights different types of challenges, including automating integration of ads into the company’s magazine site platform, diagnosing software interaction problems, and optimizing the code base.

While his job is not as heart-pulsating as the military, Kevin is happy and believes it was his life-altering decision to join App Academy that pushed him to be all he could be in tech.

Why Kevin attended App Academy

After leaving the military, Kevin says he wanted to find an inventive job where he could build and create things. He started by helping a friend run a small online eyewear business called GlassyPeople. The young veteran created and managed the startup’s Shopify website, where customers purchased flexible and durable glasses. But from the very beginning, he didn’t like Shopify’s software templates (they were confusing to work with) and wanted to make his own.

Soon, he realized that to make a proper, fully functional site, he needed a good foundation in web development, particularly in JavaScript. In an interview, Kevin told us how he learned HTML and CSS on his own to make basic customizations on Shopify.

I wanted to change it