Hi. I'm James Lentzsch.

Though I come from a creative background, I have always been an engineer. When I was six, I was sent to an advanced Lego Technic camp for kids more than twice my age. I would spend hours on end building, so focused that I would forget to eat. In highschool, while it was practically required by law for Texas boys to be on the football team, I was on the Solar Car Team, building and racing street legal solar cars, teaching other students how to do the same, and hosting races for us to compete in. The array and battery system I designed and built was used on the car for nearly a decade after I left. The team also hosted a renowned regional science fair where I built a two meter long bridge out of popsicle sticks that supported at least 400 pounds. We ran out of space for people to stand on it. My love of science and technology was apparent throughout my youth and it’s no wonder that this is around the time when I first started messing around with HTML and computers.

I fell into film at an early age and so that’s what I majored in, but my electives were filled with electrical engineering and particle physics classes. During my entertainment career, I did just about every job on and off set at one point or another, but the jobs I gravitated toward and enjoyed most - producing and writing - were jobs that require creative problem solving. Writing and adaptation of prexisting IP or historical events in particular reminds me a lot of coding: you have a certain amount of information, thoughts, and feelings you need to get across in a limited amount of time and space while following a specific formula and structure. By utilizing only a few literary devices - or now, as a programmer, only a few lines of code - one is able to create endless possibilities. Engineers use things like loops and data structures, writers use things like foreshadowing and irony.

I enjoyed a fairly successful entertainment career, but I realized not too long ago that it was not fulfilling my desire to exercise the left side of my brain just as much as the right. After a short stint as a commercial real estate agent I found myself taking to the analysis and strategy more than anything else. I eventually stumbled upon Harvard’s C50 on Edx. For the first time since childhood, I spent hours on end building something to the point that I had forgotten to eat. I knew then that this was what I was looking for. I decided to explore programming with all I had and dove headfirst into self-study and joined the best full-stack bootcamp I could find, App Academy.