David Molina, Driven to Help Veterans Learn To Code, and an Invaluable Sabio Partner
David Molina is the face of perseverance. The tenacious grit that fuels his character expresses itself every time he is confronted by various forms of adversity. David is a human spirit on fire. While most of this nature is a product of genetics, causality has certainly shaped the sharp tip of his resolve. After twelve years of military service to the U.S. Army, as both enlisted and as an officer, David left departed Dover Air Force Base to pursue his current dream of becoming a software engineer. Efforts to learn on his own produced more frustration than anything resembling self-progression.
“The magic of coding never revealed itself during that time,” David said. “But I was so driven to learn to code, despite the fact I couldn’t deploy anything. I took a course from One Month Rails, and it just clicked.”
Fraternizing with web developers and software engineers in the Baltimore area did reveal numerous mysteries about open source software, and Ruby on Rails, in particular. He began to make progress, but David felt he needed to completely immerse himself in an accelerated coding boot camp environment to thoroughly make that leap. Regrettably, his G.I. Bill could not be used to finance any coding boot camp program at the time.
The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, now commonly known as the G.I. Bill, was signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Benefits included dedicated payments of tuition and living expenses to attend colleges/universities or vocational/technical schools, and provided low-cost mortgages, and low interest loans to start businesses, as well as one year of unemployment compensation. It was available to all U.S. veterans who had been on active duty and who were honorably discharged. This program was largely responsible for elevating and strengthening the American middle class, while fueling an economic boom that prevailed all the way to the 1980s. Over the years ‘Fly by Night’ for-profit colleges naturally appeared after signage of the law in 1944. The opportunity to profit from this vast expense of public money proved to be irresistible. Many of these schools were so obvious about their intentions, mainly because they exclusively targeted military veterans. Over the next six decades, this abuse became so rampant, that President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13607 to ensure that predatory colleges could not aggressively successfully recruit vulnerable military service members, veterans, and/or their families. These legal protections for military veterans don’t always work as designed. Because of this marked behavior by for-profit colleges, accelerated information technology style boot camps automatically fell into marked grey areas and affected David Molina’s aspirations to pursue software development training through a coding boot camp. So David resorted to Plan B.
David launched Operation Code’s website in 2014 with one primary goal: to petition Congress to expand the New G.I. Bill to include accelerated coding programs. Within months, David continued to write more code, adding page after page, offering a curated list of both coding bootcamps and online tech education, and offering software mentorship through volunteer software engineers. By year’s end Operation Code began channeling veterans scholarships to its members to attend software conferences, and in May 2016 received approval from the IRS as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Operation Code quickly began to scale to serve the military community learn to code, enter the tech industry, and code the future.
Operation Code offers transitioning service members, guard/reserve troops, veterans and military spouses multiple means of emotional and fiscal support. Its membership has grown into a massive group of over 2,140 members globally dispersed, from Los Angeles to Europe, all communicating through over 60 different internet channels using the internet Slack app. Operation Code’s all-volunteer crews take on numerous tasks, from partnerships with coding bootcamps to offer full-ride scholarships to coordinating registration disbursement for developer conferences to creating a robust software mentorship program that transitions their members to tech.
Sabio is one of over ten coding bootcamps that accepts the New G.I. Bill. Since becoming a coding school partner, Sabio has played a major role working directly with Operation Code. The Veterans Administration now recognizes and has approved Sabio as a G.I. Bill approved coding bootcamp through its program with Antioch University. As an approved G.I. Bill-provider, military veteran graduates ave flourished from the Sabio experience and the continuing education provided throughout the Sabio network to be professionally employed throughout the United States and abroad.
Sabio was an early coding bootcamp to build a close relationship with Operation Code as a partner. It’s evident in the recent class which developed a .NET web application that is now hosted on Operation Code’s GitHub. Last fall, David flew down to Los Angeles to be on the judging panel at the first VetsHack Hackathon. Sabio believes that providing every available opportunity to military veterans to become software developers and transition from military service to the tech ecosystem is a win-win for everyone, including the technology companies that will benefit through Operation Code’s members’ leadership, tenacity, persistence and grit — all timeless qualities that are value-add on any engineering team.
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