jOeCHEM - Carbon based chemistry made easy (for free)

My name is Joe Del Nano, and I majored in chemical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. I currently work as a DevOps engineer at a self driving car company, and while I don't use my degree, chemistry is very much in my life. I believe anyone can excel at Organic Chemistry, and that's why I created jOeCHEM.io. jOeCHEM is my curriculum (spanning OChem I and II) of instructional videos paired with worksheets + solutions (all for free) aimed at propelling even the average Joe to organic success. But this was not the plan. It was an unexpected, windy road to today. Let me tell you about it.

At the time of writing, I am a 25 year old living in Pittsburgh, PA. I work as a DevOps Engineer at Motional, a company owned 50% by Aptiv and 50% by Hyundai Motor Company that develops self driving cars and technology. I love my job. I love writing code to automate tasks and solve problems. But coding was NOT my first passion. In fact, if 18 year old Joe knew what 25 year old Joe was doing for a job, he'd fall right over.

Instead, younger Joe would've bet on Organic Chemistry being at the core of his career because OChem was my first true passion. I was fortunate enough to take an OChem class offered at my high school, and that's what enticed me to major in chemical engineering at Pitt. I was instantly hooked on carbon. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do for a career, but what I did know was that if OChem was involved in some capacity, I was going to be a happy camper.

As I traveled my way through the chemical engineering curriculum, I found myself not nearly as enthralled by the core classes as I was by OChem — yeah, process dynamics and mass transfer were cool, but they didn't give me the same rush as unraveling a synthesis problem did. Around that same time, I started an engineering co-op (an agreement with a company to alternate class and working semesters, typically three times) at EQT, a natural gas operator in downtown Pittsburgh. I entered the co-op positive and hopeful that I would enjoy petroleum engineering and begin digging my heels into what could be the start of my career.

I quickly became negative and jaded.

I do not like to speak poorly about others or companies, but the prevailing culture at EQT was one of working-for-the-weekend, looking-out-for-ones-self, and just flat out sad. I was left un-mentored, largely ignored, and without any work assigned to me. And when I did ask others for work, I was afraid that I was just annoying full time engineers. No one was invested in helping me grow and learn. The only thing I could do to pass the time was mind-numbing Excel busy work.

The Excel tasks I had to do were so incredibly repetitive. I knew there had to be a better way, some way to automate the manual clicking, copying, and pasting I was doing. After a few Google searches, I discovered what VBA was, a programming language you can write in Excel. At this point, I froze — I had only ran into programming once in my life, in an intro to engineering class my freshman year. And I sucked at it. Badly.

But I had all the time in the world, no distractions, and frankly, no other choice. So I dove headfirst into the world of VBA, and while I did not get great at it, I slowly started to see the joy of watching VBA code performing the heavy grunt work I had been doing by hand. And if felt awesome! It was then that I realized I'd rather be writing code than whatever the heck I was doing at EQT. But was I going to ditch my major and start from scratch?

While it felt liberating to discover what might be an exciting, challenging future career, I had some facts to face: I was more than halfway done with my chemical engineering schooling, and I essentially had no marketable coding skills. So I devised a plan with the help of my brothers: I decided to finish out ChemE while simultaneously working on my own time to build a programming portfolio, showcasing the coding skills I hoped to obtain, to qualify me for a job I would like.

With a rough plan in place, I needed a programatic place to start. And of course I thought "how could I involve organic chemistry?". At that point in time in particular, I had been TAing and tutoring like a madman. So I thought: Could I automate myself? Could I create a website that would essentially function as my specialized crash course in Organic Chemistry, explaining concepts and reactions in such a way to make OChem accessible to anyone watching? And thus, jOeCHEM was born.

In January 2016, construction on jOeCHEM.io began. There was a lot of work to do, and I had to learn a LOT along the way, but in January 2017, jOeCHEM was live. It was NOT complete by any means, but it was a start. And over the years, I continued to work on it. And as I kept learning more, I thought maybe I'll land a job in software and get to do work that I really enjoy for a living. And sure enough, I was fortunate to get a job in 2018 with Aptiv in their autonomous driving division, which is now the standalone company Motional.

Present day, I'm still working on jOeCHEM. I'm still improving the content of the site (videos, worksheets, study guides, etc) as well as its functionality and presentation. But I think I have more to offer the brave jOeCHEMists than just carbon explanations.

I learned a lot getting to where I am now, about time management, about redirecting your life's course (in terms of career), and life in general. I know it's cliché to say, but I wish I knew at 18 what I now know at 25. I would've felt a LOT less anxious and been more confident in the moves I was making. That's what I want to accomplish with these blog posts.

PS I was fortunate enough to speak to the Pitt American Chemical Society chapter about the journey of jOeCHEM in February 2020, so if you'd like to see a video version of what I wrote above, check this video out.

Thanks for reading.

Organically,
Joe