Student Spotlight: Paul Blackstone

Paul Blackstone is a pretty inspiring guy. He’s an Entrepreneur, Mobile Security Expert, Veteran, Crossfit fanatic and an awesome dad. He’s been working in the security field for twenty years and coding for ten years. Paul, like many One Month students, wanted to build his first API quickly, but he kept getting stuck.

He tried learning a few different languages, but none of them were the right fit. One Month Rails was the first course he took that required him to write code and interact simultaneously with the material. Paul wanted to build a platform that allowed people to register, locate other users, visit a public board leader board, but he also wanted it to have the capability to take payments. He found that by hacking together an understanding of the right languages (Stripe, Ruby on Rails, iOS, as well as the Apple backend language), he could create something useful on his own.

Why was this a game changer for Paul? He didn’t have to find a technical founder to build his first prototype. He now had something tangible to put out into the world, the vocabulary to communicate his vision, and find the best developer for the job.