From pro basketball to self-taught engineer

I spent 14 years playing professional basketball across 9 countries. Not LeBron, but a real career. I won a state title at Wheeler High School, broke the all-time scoring record at Mercer University, spent time at a 76ers training camp sharing a locker room with Andre Iguodala, Jrue Holiday, and Lou Williams before a hamstring injury ended that run. Then Europe for over a decade, including playing against Nikola Jokić before he took over the NBA, and Boban Marjanović before he made it there too.

Toward the end of my career I started wondering what came next. Like most people, I thought I had a great app idea. When I looked into hiring someone to build it, the price killed that plan fast. So I thought, how hard could it actually be?

I didn't study CS, never took a class. I bought Python Crash Course and got to work. Pro basketball gives you a lot of time between morning shootaround and evening practice, usually 5 or 6 hours. I used all of it. Eight-hour bus trips, airport waiting rooms, late nights after practice. I remember watching a Corey Schafer YouTube video trying to deploy my first site to Heroku, staying up until 6am with practice at 10.

By early 2024 I had a full platform built, my first app, a restaurant menu tool. Not revolutionary, but I built it from scratch.

During an offseason back in Atlanta I started going to tech meetups. At one of them I ended up sharing a table with two guys who turned out to be the CTO and VP of Engineering of a startup. I had no idea. I just rambled about my picture menu app like it was going to change the world. They loved the basketball-to-builder story and one of them, Byron, offered to mentor me with monthly calls while I was still playing in Turkey.

When I retired and came back to the States, Byron got me an interview. I had never interviewed before in my life. The question was how to convert an integer to a string without a built-in function. I fumbled through it, face in hands, not knowing they could still see me on screen the whole time. I got a message that night saying I didn't do as badly as I thought, and they offered me a 3-month contract.

I went full-time as a Data Engineer in January 2025. Still can't believe I get paid to do this.

And I'm still building in my free time. After shutting down the first app, I kept thinking about what else I could make. I landed on calendars, specifically what they could do beyond appointments and reminders. If friends shared their general schedules, you'd probably see each other more. And if you logged a trip, your friends should know about it.

That idea came from life. Playing overseas, I'd be in a teammate's hometown in the offseason with no idea they lived there. Or I'd see an Instagram story of a friend in Atlanta, hit them up, and find out they'd been there a week and were leaving the next day.

So I built SoKal, a social calendar that uses your plans to stay in sync with friends. It finds when you and a friend will be in the same city, shows you what people have planned for the week, and notifies you when someone is nearby. No location tracking, or anything like that. Just what you and your friends have planned.