Brody Dingel

My journey into software engineering

I grew up in small-town Iowa and headed to Iowa State University after high school. Didn't quite know what I wanted to do with my life at that point, but I quickly discovered a passion for Spanish and Linguistics. I was fascinated at how structured human language is, and that drew me into a dual Spanish 🇪🇸 and Linguistics major.

By the end of my first year, I was introduced to programming. 💻 And so my career began!

I spent the next three years dabbling in programming while I focused on my studies in Spanish and Linguistics. Mostly Perl and Python, of which I remember almost nothing 😅 But my interest continued to grow little by little.

After graduating with my bachelor's degrees, I continued my studies at ISU in a Master's program in Applied Linguistics. I was deeply interested in coding by this point, so I declared an emphasis in computational/corpus linguistics. 😄

In December 2018, I decided to make a career switch to software engineeering! 🎉 Fortunately, my major professor had a background in software and agreed to help me in my journey.

My breakthrough 💥 opportunity came a few months later when I was asked to teach an introductory course titled "Computers and Language" in the Linguistics program. I knew I wanted to teach my upcoming students how to use regular expressions, so I decided to build a website for that purpose. It took me the full summer of 2019, but I did it!

My first website was quite the learning experience, and it fulfilled its purpose. It had ~150 total users over the course of the year, and I was able to make improvements to it to fit my students' needs.

As I neared graduation, I got an interview with Hy-Vee and showed off my course website. 🤓 It went pretty well! And after learning that Hy-Vee uses React, I spent the following winter break React-ifying my site to learn the skills for the job.

Diving into the world of software engineering as a hobbyist was definitely a big change, but I haven't looked back. Fun stuff! 😎

Outside of work

When I'm not working, I'm usually hanging out with my amazing wife and daughters. ❤️ My wife is wonderful and has supported me throughout this whole journey, and my daughter has brought a whole new level of joy into our lives that we never would've thought possible. We like playing games, walks on Iowa trails, and reading lots.

If I'm not with them, I'm probably playing around with some new technology, trying my hand at woodworking, pretending I know how to golf, or reading.