Hello, everyone! I'm Cory Althoff, and I just joined the Vonage Community Team as a developer advocate.

My programming journey began after I graduated from college with a degree in political science. Unable to find a job, I decided to teach myself how to program. A year later, to my disbelief, I was working as a software engineer at eBay.

Eventually, I decided to write a book about my experience learning to program professionally called "The Self-Taught Programmer". To my surprise, my book ended up taking off and turned into a full-time job helping people learn to program. In addition to my book, I started a blog and Facebook group for self-taught programmers, which now has close to sixty thousand members. I also created a Udemy course to accompany "The Self-Taught Programmer" and wrote a follow-up book called "The Self-Taught Computer Scientist", coming out in July.

Creating a self-taught programmer community made me realize how much I enjoy building community among developers and helping developers learn new things. I love how rewarding it is to teach, especially when you teach something like programming that can positively impact someone's life. I'm incredibly excited to continue my journey educating developers in my new role at Vonage.

When I'm not working, you can find me with my wife entertaining my eight-month-old daughter. Before the pandemic, I played basketball a few times a week. I even won a Zog Sports rec-league championship, which was the highlight of my athletic career. I've been trying to get into golf but haven't had much luck so far because I'm terrible at it.

I can't wait to continue my journey helping educate developers in my new role. I love public speaking, programming, writing, and creating videos, and I still can't believe I found a job that lets me do all these things at once! I am excited to be a member of this team, and I look forward to helping spread the word about Vonage's APIs and supporting our incredible community of developers!