by Andrew Zaleski

David Molina was stationed at Dover Air Force Base, 100 miles outside Baltimore, when he started trying to become a coder. After 12 years of service, his time in the army was almost up, and he needed a new career. “My dream has always been to create something in my head,” says the 38-year-old Molina. So in his spare time, he tried to build iPhone apps and learn some basic programming. He even took Mattan Griffel’s One Month Rails course on Skillshare.

He wasn’t very successful. “It just didn’t click. I couldn’t deploy anything.” Molina started hunting for help in Baltimore, where he quickly fell into B’more on Rails, a longstanding Ruby on Rails Meetup in the city. “People taught me about open source. There was pizza, there was beer,” he recalls. “They made me feel like I was at home.”