Sam Tymorek was not exactly one of Boston’s hottest commodities back in 2008. With a master’s degree in music composition, he was working as an unpaid intern at a recording studio, hoping it might lead to a position as an audio engineer. But he was paying the bills by manning the cash register at a Brookline burrito shop.

“I had some experience working as an audio engineer, but it was really difficult to find any kind of job in music,” Tymorek says. “But I had some friends who were software developers, and they not only had jobs, but they liked them.” Tymorek had taken some programming courses in college, so he checked a book out of the library and started to teach himself the Java language.