Clinton Dreisbach

Programmer, musician, game designer.

Welcome!

My face

Hi - I'm Clinton, and I'm the CTO of Momentum Learning in Durham, NC. I've previously worked with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, The Iron Yard, and RTI International, among others. My big passions are my kids and making the world of programming a more welcoming and diverse place.

Recent articles

I took my son Dashiell to something called Defy Gravity today. It’s a giant room filled with trampolines, plus something called a “ninja course.”

Did you know jumping on trampolines is hard work? When I was a kid, I thought it was the easiest thing in the world. I barely survived this morning.

Pit of doom

This is something I’m going to call a “moon pit.” I have no idea how deep that pit of foam blocks is, because I never reached bottom. Dashiell could jump in and scamper out because he weighs 35 pounds. I weigh enough that it’s kind of embarrassing and is better represented in binary: 11010010. I would estimate it took me 1 minute per foot of area I had to cover in that pit of doom. The time I jumped as far as I could in was really fun while I was in the air and then 5 minutes of bootcamp-level exertion.

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Demo Day December 2014

At the end of each semester at The Iron Yard, our students present their final projects to the local development community and potential employers at our Demo Day. We had our most recent one this Friday, and it was fantastic. It was particularly special to me, as I’ve been out with the King Under the Mountain and so haven’t been as involved in my students’ final projects as last time. My colleagues Jessica, Mason, and Chris stepped up to help them across the finish line. Read more...

My programming story, part 4

The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I lived with my grandma in Auburn, AL, and attended Auburn University for a semester, taking Chemistry 101, Calculus 101, and a computer science course that used Fortran. My grandma was amazing. I know everyone thinks their grandma is sweet and I’m not going to convince anyone that mine was the sweetest, but I know the truth on this one. Read more...

My programming story, part 3

Windows and Visual Basic happened for me at the same time. My parents got a new computer with this Windows operating system on it. I’d never seen a graphical user interface before, so it blew my mind, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it do anything, so a week later I bought Visual Basic 1.0 at Babbage’s in the Columbus mall with my money I earned picking up turf scraps. Read more...

My programming story, part 2

Around 1986, I discovered Logo. It came on a cartridge for my PCjr, and I was very excited to find out there was more than one programming language in the world. (I know, how did I not know this? We lived in a pre-Internet world, though, and I lived in super-rural Alabama, so you found out a very selective group of facts at a time. One of my memories I love so much is when I’d go to the Sam Goody in the mall in Columbus, GA after my orthodonist appointments and buy cassettes from the bargain bin at the front of the store based solely on their cover. Read more...

My programming story, part 1

I wrote my first program on an IBM PC XT my parents had bought to run the books for their farm. It was in the BASIC programming language. That computer came with a collection of ring binders, one of which contained a reference for BASIC. I don’t remember what the first thing I wrote was, but it probably looked like this: 10PRINT"CLINT IS AWESOME" 20GOTO10 I went by Clint back then. Read more...

My theory of code schools

Note: I’m an instructor at The Iron Yard. Nothing in this blog post is their opinion or endorsed by them. I doubt any of it is controversial, but it’s my thoughts and doesn’t necessarily reflect anyone else’s. When I first considered working at a code school – that is, for the hypothetical person reading this that doesn’t know, a for-profit technical school that teaches adults how to become programmers – I had to spend some time wrapping my head around the concept. Read more...
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