Welcome to the COVID podcast. We talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I'm your host, Ron, and today we're talking about Civic Tech with Aidan Feldman, technology director at General Service Administration's Technology Transformation Services.

So all these different things converge to make it a really good fit, where I didn't know I was looking for civic tech specifically, but I got really lucky in finding it.

Aidan talks about the hurdles and hoops of working in civic tech and the skills you need to excel at it.

After this.

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What are we watching?

Heads of State, that new action comedy with Idris Elber as the Prime Minister, John Sina as the President, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, as their only hope. It looks like a blast. From fast delivery to explosive entertainment, it's on Prime. For only $899 a month, join now. Content includes limited ads, subscription, or to our news. For more information, go to amazon.com.uk.U.K. slash prime. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So before we dive into your very impressive title at the very impressive agency you work at, I want to start all the way of the beginning. How did you start your coding journey? Yeah. So I went into college as an undeclared engineer. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I thought maybe something mechanical. And all of the engineers

the first year are required to take a computer science class. The people who survived it,

sort of stayed in computer science or computer engineering, something like that, and everyone else did something else, and I narrowly survived it.

Tell me more about that class.

Yeah, so it was a pretty typical for academia kind of CS one-on-one class, and you're learning things like variables and loops and that time the class

was taught in C++ and so you're learning about things like memory management and pointers,

a bit of like how computers work as a result of that. It's really just like the fundamentals

of syntax and understanding

basics of algorithms, data structures, and those kinds of things.

So for someone who did not take an official computer science class, all that sounds very intimidating,

is it as scary as it sounds, or what is it that makes it so difficult, such a weed out class?

Yeah, it certainly was a weed out class.

I don't think it has to be that way.

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