Student Spotlight — Davey Hays

Student Spotlights allow us to recognize students whose contributions make Atlas School a welcoming, uplifting community. Students can nominate their peers for going above and beyond in their coursework and support of their fellow classmates. 

We sat down with Davey Hays, the February 2025 nominee, to learn about his experience as a student at Atlas and his life beyond school. Davey is a student in our Computer Science, Linux, Advanced Algorithms, and Blockchain program. For a list of programs Atlas is currently enrolling, please visit our programs page.

What do you love about Tulsa?

I grew up here. I feel like I’ve got a good finger on the pulse of this town. Especially downtown: things are fun but not hectic. There isn’t that manic energy of bigger cities. There’s a big creative culture here. Any weird projects or ideas you have, you can usually find someone to collaborate with on them.

What is your favorite spot on campus?

My favorite spot on campus is the set of whiteboard tables on the first floor of the Annex. A lot of the traffic comes through that area. If I want to chat with students from other specialties or want to escape from the classroom for a bit, it’s a great place to connect with other people and destress. 

What is your favorite thing about being an Atlas student?

Atlas’s best resource is its people. Having instructors who've been software developers from a variety of specializations and backgrounds means no matter what sort of question I have, someone has an answer for it.

What is unique about Atlas School? 

Through online forums, like Reddit, I hear of many graduates coming out of four-year universities with a technical degree and they still don’t know how to program - which to me is mind blowing, because we’ve been programming since day one. We’ve been making big, complex programs as part of our curriculum. While we may not know all the esoteric ins and outs of really obscure data structures, like someone with a four-year degree, we already have a full portfolio of projects, showcasing what we’re able to do. That’s unique. This is as much a trade school as it is anything else. We graduate fully job-ready. 

Coming from a blue collar background, it really syncs with how I view the world and labor and my place in that paradigm. 

Why did you choose to learn coding?

I grew up believing computer programming was for smart people and I wasn't smart enough to do it. Turns out I'm not only smart enough to do anything, but big scary concepts are just multiple easy-to-learn concepts in a trench coat. Programming allows me to make complicated and cool things for relatively free, it scratches my analytical itch, and makes me feel super clever.

When I decided to join, I knew I wanted to start at the floor - I wanted to learn what I call the "deep magic". Where does the hardware end and the software begin? What are the fundamental building blocks of an executable process? How does assembly work? The LAB program at Atlas has been incredible for getting down to some of the lowest levels of computing which is really foundational and helps me appreciate all the software built upon it.

What has your student journey looked like?

I started my program at Atlas while fully employed. Originally, I was hired in an entry-level position, but through force of will turned it into a position of authority. Now, I have a very high level overview of our processes. I might identify a bottleneck and tend to it, speeding things up. I make sure to coordinate with different teams to get things done ahead of time. 

I love the top-down view of systems, problems, and processes. I like to understand the starting and end points. I ask questions like, “how can we make this more efficient”. 

This enjoyment of digging deep into processes, translates to my Atlas track. In my program we started off learning the coding language, C, then we went into web development, then made our way back to C. It's a low level language; only a couple layers of abstraction over machine code. 

I didn't just want to learn the basics. For me to really understand programming, I needed to learn it from the bottom; going as deep as it goes and growing from there. Without a firm understanding of the lower level processes, I thought I would be lost. I feel like C is that: the lowest level, the root of the process, closest to the bare metal.

What type of person should come to Atlas? 

Someone curious. Someone who’s willing to keep going even when they’re not sure if they have what it takes. Even when you doubt yourself, if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you can do this. 

What advice would you give prospective students?

If I can give you any advice, it would be that if you come to Atlas with a job, you can make it work, but it will be very hard. If you can’t devote 100% of your life to it, look for ways to optimize your time. My first few weeks here, every hour was accounted for. I had no free time. Everything was school or work. But, through optimizing my time and schedule and learning how to get into homework-mode faster or how to make quicker meals for dinner - I was able to carve out a little bit of a social life. So if you can focus on time management, the rest will handle itself. If you can do something in one keystroke when it used to take three, it seems so trivial a thing, but it maximizes your efficiency and you’ll pay dividends on your time.

What is a problem you see in tech, and how does Atlas prepare you to change that?

The lack of care when it comes to the visceral user experience. There are programs that I use that clearly did not have the end user in mind, where I have to conform to the program. That’s not the way the world should work. I fix problems like these with my focus on optimization, building things that are fast, very low-level processes. At Atlas, all of our code is thoroughly tested when we send it to be checked. Checking can get real nitty gritty. This can feel restrictive and annoying but at the end of the day, when you’re making something, you really don’t want it to break. The more testing you can do, the more robust you can make it, the better the end product will be. By nature, the way that Atlas works, you really learn the value of that strong testing model which prepares me to provide a positive end-use experience. 

Anything else? 

I’m really happy with where Chappell Roan’s career is going. In an interview she called out one of my favorite, more underground artists, Hemlock Springs. I love her work. Check her out.

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