I'm J.C. Hiatt. I live in Mississippi with my beautiful family, where I craft code and please the shareholders.

My love of computers began when I was 6, where I spent my days playing Duke Nukem on an old Pentium machine and Pokemon Yellow on my Gameboy Color.

Fast forward to 13 years old and I'm quick-scoping fools and superbouncing out of the map on Halo 2. I've been exposed to the concept of "hacking" — the ability to make a computer do anything I want — and it has gripped me. I've finally made friends who are as nerdy as me on Xbox Live and I want to make a website for our "hacker group".

I spend a month at my grandma's in rural Mississippi. Armed with only a 2G connection and a Samsung Blackjack, I go through HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript on W3Schools (relax, it was 2005), and hand-write all my notes.

I return home and finally have access to a computer again. I fire up Notepad++ and build my hacker group's website. The world is my oyster.

For the rest of high school, I begin building websites for local businesses. After high school and a brief stint at a couple of jobs as a web developer, I quickly learn I do not enjoy working for others. I start my own ad agency, which then pivots to "product agency", which then pivots to bankruptcy. 🙈

I decide money is nice and working for others isn't so bad. From there, I become a tenacious learner. I'd been programming and building websites in some capacity since I was 13, but never with any formal training or mentors around to tell me how horrible my code was. I surround myself with great mentors (love you, Billy ❤️) and relentlessly consume as my knowledge and experice building things as quickly as I can.

Fast forward 6 years and today I work as a Senior Software Engineer at Walmart and a CTO at an EdTech startup called Learn Arena. I absolutely love programming and what it has done for my life. Coding is a mystic art that allows me to create anything I want. I am an entrepreneur at heart and I love how empowering it is to be a technical entrepreneur.

On any given day, you can find me coding in the coffee shop or my office, hanging with my beautiful family, or breaking arms and hearts on the mats at Grapple, my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

I hope in some way I can make your life better even in just a small way. Thanks for stopping by. 👋