I love the creative aspect of coding. That’s powerful to me.

KAMEA

My first experience with tech and the internet was a DOS computer my father had and that I played games on like Q*bert.

I still remember my favorite command : “dir/w” to check the directory. I grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada (the middle part), the second youngest of five kids. My father is from Canada; my mother is from the Pacific Islands -- Tonga, to be exact.

The skills I acquired in dentistry was how to focus! My world was very narrow because my magnification glasses zoomed me in to focus on the world of millimeters. The focus is so narrow and for such a long time, I developed the skill of being quiet and still for a long period of time which doesn’t feel much different from coding.

The difference in coding is, the patient is a logical piece of hardware - not an emotional human being.

The other experience I’ve had was growing up in a Jackson 5 “ish” singing group for 15 years. We sang and danced on stage wearing MC Hammer Pants and I developed a love for music, performance, and production. All of these will be great assets in building software that will be on “stage” to perform for its users. I love the creative aspect of coding. That’s powerful to me.

The venerable Q*bert was Dr. Kamea's earliest encounter with tech.

I’ve worked with developers for the last four years building out ideas I’ve had. I wasn’t necessarily inspired by them, but by the frustration of not being able to create what I wanted. I compare it to having somebody produce music for me to perform versus me creating myself. I was driven by the desire for independence. There is nothing worse than feeling like you could do it better yourself but you lack the skills to do it. So I decided two years ago that I would create the space in my life to learn this skill and build my own capacity to create software and build businesses my way.

*Dr. Kamea took his skills from dentistry and applied them to his new career in development.*

My first development project was a website for my music portfolio.

I built it on a basic template from WordPress and modified the code a bit to suit my goals. I quickly realized that I can totally jack up a website playing around with code I didn’t understand. So I did this probably 10 more times with different projects and started to learn how to read basic PHP and HTML/CSS. I learned that what looks “simple” to the user, can be quite complicated on the back end! Since then I stopped referring to ideas I had as being a “simple” software project.

I’ve picked up a few development projects to build websites, but my main goal is to build a dev shop that can build and support the businesses I will be building. I have one that is in the works, and three more that are coming down the pipeline so my goal is to build a development team that can focus on DevOps style of projects to build MVPs fast and test them in the “wild” right away. My goal is to be my first employee and build from there!

I love producing R&B and reggae music. I have a music video called “That Feeling” that is on Youtube. I also have a few songs on my son’s youtube channel called Where is She Now and Love you Right. All of these were written, produced, and performed by me.

Get inspired with Dr. Kamea's journey from dentist to developer on Youtube!

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