April 7, 2025 • 44 mins
This episode is a little different—thanks to a U.S. holiday, I’m flying solo. But that just means we get to have a one-on-one chat!
I dive into my career journey—not to brag, but to offer insights for anyone feeling stuck, of how my inventor grandfather sparked my early interest in tech, how I transitioned from electrical engineering to computer engineering, and how I went from IT support to discovering my love for programming while solving real-world problems at Mosey with Ruby on Rails.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/javascript-jabber--6102064/support.
I dive into my career journey—not to brag, but to offer insights for anyone feeling stuck, of how my inventor grandfather sparked my early interest in tech, how I transitioned from electrical engineering to computer engineering, and how I went from IT support to discovering my love for programming while solving real-world problems at Mosey with Ruby on Rails.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/javascript-jabber--6102064/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, folks, welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber
now here in.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Oh what is that? Sorry?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I'm using a system that I haven't used in a while,
and it's got new features. So it just popped up
and said, hey, you've got your live So I guess
we're live on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and riverside if you
want to come watch us on the app or recording
on so anyway, it's just me because it's a holiday
(00:37):
here in the US, and so AJ and Steve apparently
have other things going on and didn't show up. Dan
said he has very good reasons for not being here,
usually has very good reasons when he's not here. And
our guest, honestly, we just switched over to this system,
and so I am going to chalk that up to
essentially accounting or pros us error. Right, he probably tried
(01:03):
to go to the stream yard link. That's some kind
of messed up. They actually lost some of our recordings
when we switched, because I guess they're happy with us
for switching here.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I shouldn't imply any motives because I don't actually know
if it was malice or in confidence, but I'm working
with them to try and figure it out, and they
basically told me to quit asking for help. So we'll
see how all of that goes. But we switched from
stream yard or to Riverside, and it turns out Riverside
has pretty much all the features that I've been asking
stream Yard for so and they're cheaper. So at the
(01:40):
end of the day's that I'm not sad that we switched.
If you're looking to do more live streaming than Streamyard
does have better features. But it looks like riversides features
have come a long way since we switched off of them,
and it wasn't terribly hard to hoo cut up. So
I'm pretty happy here and maybe we'll dive into that,
(02:01):
or maybe I'll do an episode on how to record podcasts.
But in the meantime, since no one showed up, I thought, hey,
I'm just gonna get on and I'm just going.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
To record and just talk about some war stories or
you know.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Essentially, what I wanted to do is just talk about
the highlights of my career. And I don't want to
just get into hey, look how great I am. What
I want to do is I want to talk about, Hey,
I was in these positions and these were the things
that really helped me get ahead, or these were the
things that really helped me learn, or things like that.
And that way I can kind of give you ideas
(02:36):
if you're feeling stuck, or if you're like, why am
I not happy in this job? Or you know, whatever,
you know, just give you a chance to hear oh,
oh okay, maybe I should try that right, or maybe
I should take this kind of a leap, or things
like that. So just to give a little bit of background,
(03:00):
I took electronics classes in high school and that was
kind of my thing, and I really enjoyed it. We
actually did get into programming some eighty eighty five or
eighty eighty eight chips, right, so we would write programs
and it would make LEDs light up, right, And so
we were programming the native language of the eighty eighty eight,
(03:20):
which was assembly language. And you know, we also built
some robots that would follow a line and things like that,
and so I've always kind of had that bent toward technology.
My grandpa actually was an inventor, and he invented a
(03:41):
smaller ellipsometer, which is a device that tests the elect
or the oxidation coating on silicon wafers that are used
to make chips, right, they have to be uniform or
pretty close to uniform, and we're talking. The term he
always used was angst, which is like the thickness of
(04:01):
a what of an oxygen atom or something. I can't
remember which atom it is, but you know, so it
had to be it had to be that accurate on
the coating or you get bad chips. And so he
invented a system that would do. They had ellipsometers, but
they would take a long time. They were really slow,
(04:22):
and they were really big, and he he invented one
that fit basically in the size of kind of a
computer case, and he could swap the wafers out every
few minutes, right, so instead of taking hours to take minutes.
He also was involved in the after the Challenger the
(04:44):
shuttle blew up in the eighties. He was working for
a company called Rockwell International, and he he invented a
laser system that checked the inside of the solid rocket
booster for impre because apparently that contributed to the O
rings failing. And so anyway, he had pictures up in
(05:07):
his office of this device that was sitting and pointed
at the side of the rocket boosters. So anyway, so
I came across all of the interest in tech kind
of honestly, right, he kind of took me under his wing,
and you know, and so I was always interested in
(05:27):
this kind of a thing. And he invented some other
stuff that I don't know that anybody would ever use.
He built himself literally this chair. So he liked to
fly remote control airplanes, which honestly is something that I
think would be fun to get into.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
But he built himself a chair, and he built himself.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Like the yoke for the pilot's chair, so it was
a pilot's chair, and he built it so that it
had polleys and stuff in it so that he could
put the remote in there and he could fly the
airplane as if he were the pilot, right, And so
he could turn the yoke and he could pull it in.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And out to make it go up and down.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
And anyway, I have fond memories of climbing trees to
retrieve his airplanes at the remote control airplane parks. But anyway,
so I got into that in high school. We were
building that stuff. And then after high school, when I
went to college, I signed up as an electrical engineering major.
(06:29):
I went on a two year mission to Italy, and
I lived in Italy for two years and taught the gospel.
That's not really relevant to this, but if you're Italian
and you want to chat, I would love to practice
my Italian. But yeah, So then I came back and
I started working on my degree for electrical engineering. And
(06:50):
as I got further in some of the classes that
they make you take or more related to chip design
and how computers work and things like that, and I
enjoyed that a whole lot.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
More more than some of the just esoteric and you know.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Deeper electrical engineering stuff. So I changed my major to
computer engineering. I had to take some computer science classes
as part of either major, and so I, you know,
I picked up some programming in college. I also did
some programming on an eighty eighty five or a TI
eighty five calculator that I had when I was in
(07:24):
junior high but it was mostly just so I could
do my homework and do it faster than just punching
everything in. But yeah, so I started taking these classes,
and I have to say that after taking that many
computer science classes, I knew for a fact I didn't
want to be a programmer. Which is kind of funny
to a lot of people. It's like, oh really, yeah,
(07:47):
I was not so keen on that. I got a
job working it at the university and so I set
up probably dozens of Linux servers and Windows servers in
the data center the first few years I worked there.
I actually worked in the data center, and so we
would monitor batch jobs and you know, get into the
(08:07):
computers and run commands and stuff like that, so you know,
help just maintain the network. So and so is having
an issue on the networks, so we'd get in and
check the configuration on the switches across campus and things
like that. So I do have kind of a strong
bent and pretty pretty good familiarity with the command line,
(08:29):
and that has really served me well over the years.
If you're looking for a skill set that a lot
of programmers don't have a good basis in that will
help you out long term, boy, I can tell you
learning the command line and learning how Linux works.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Will do you a world of good.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
And it's translated really nicely into areas like Docker. So
you know, just putting it out there, if that's something
that you're looking to, you know, it's like, okay, what
can I learn that makes me more competitive and you know,
a better.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Programmer and things like that.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Anyway, Yeah, that's that that was something that really made
a big difference. So anyway, so that's that kind of
gives you some background. Before I got that first job,
and incidentally, that job out of college, so I had
some other jobs. I left the IT job to go
take an internship where I was actually writing patent applications
because I thought I wanted to be a patent attorney.
(09:29):
And yeah, I figured out real quick that that wasn't
really my cup of tea. So I went back worked
in IT a little longer, setting up servers things like that.
We used VMware on the servers and so we got
multiple servers on the same hardware. And then I got
hired at Mosey and Mosey. I was working for them
(09:51):
answering support, mostly emails. They expanded they put out a
pro product for businesses, and so then we were doing
phone calls as well. And this is where I really
got into programming, and I figured out that I loved programming.
And the difference was was that we had this problem where.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
We needed to.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Be able to keep better track because there were two
of us and we were answering emails in Thunderbird, which
is an email client, and so what we would do
is we would just grab the next unread or unreplied.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And we would start working on it.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
And sometimes we would figure out that the other guy
was working on it too, and we were getting enough
support requests to where we were starting to need other people,
and so we were going to have to hire a team.
And so it just wasn't going to work, and so
we went to our boss, who incidentally we found out
later that were related. His mom and my mom are cousins,
(10:53):
but we just hadn't really done anything with his family
because they lived in California and we lived in Utah.
But anyway, so we went to him and we said, hey, look,
you know, we need something better to manage the emails
coming in and stuff like that. And he looked at
us and basically said that he didn't have budget for it,
and so we started building it. And the technology that
(11:13):
they were using at at Mosey for the web based
technology was Ruby on Rails, and so we started building
the system in Ruby on Rails and essentially what we
would it would do is it would ingest the emails
periodically and then what it would do is if one
of us loaded the email, it would put a mutex
(11:36):
or you know, or basically lock it for ten minutes
or something on the server on the database, so that
if I opened the email, he wouldn't open it.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Right and for ten minutes.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
And so then if I replied, then it would be
Marcus replied, and he would you know, he would never
see it the other guy. And so then when we
hired more people than they could just get in and
they could do it well. It also turned out that
like eighty percent of the people who were requesting help
were also requesting the same probably handful of issues, and
so we put in canned replies and we basically said, hey,
(12:16):
look we're you know, here's here's your answer.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So that was that was the deal.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But what was really interesting was that the issue that
I had with the with programming and the reason I
didn't want to be a programmer based on my computer
science stuff, was that I wasn't solving real problems, right,
I had no stake in it other than my grade,
and some of the problems felt kind.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Of contrived, right.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
It was like, hey, we're going to make up a
problem for you to solve that nobody cares about, right,
And so I didn't feel like I was making a difference.
And I realized working for MOSY that that was something.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
That I really cared about.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
And so when I talked to people now about their
careers and where they're going and what they want to
learn and things like that, is like, look, you know
what what gives you fulfillment at work?
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Right?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Because some people I've figured out and for me some
of this applies. But the biggest thing for me is
I want to feel like I'm making a difference. So
for me, usually I'm looking for opportunities to mentor other
people I'm using. I'm looking for opportunities to save a
big pile of money for my employer. Right, it's like, hey,
we made the application, you know, six times more efficient,
(13:29):
so you don't have to pay for you know whatever
server and other the other the other systems. Right, you
don't have to pay for all of that, right, So,
or you know, we clean up the code, right, and
so it's like, hey, we can get we can get
the programming done faster when we need new features, or
(13:52):
it's more easy to maintain, or we catch more bugs.
And because we have a better test suite or things
like that. Right, So for me, it's I really want
to move the needle. I want somebody to look at
the work I did and say wow, that that changed
the complexion of things for us. Right, So in the contract,
I'm working right now, right, they we figured out that
(14:14):
it was doing a whole bunch of repeat work in
the workers.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
That were you know, it's like, hey, do this job.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Well, it turned out that a lot of times when
it said hey, do this job, effectively what it was
doing is it was it was saying do this work,
but the work was going to be done by a
job that was already in the queue. And so I
set it up to just look in the queue and say,
are you already going to do this work?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Okay, don't schedule it.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
And we got less complaints from from the client, right
because they're like, it's not calculating all the time, right,
It's it's telling us it actually finished the calculation so
we can use the numbers that are in there. This
is for a hedge fund, by the way, So so
so those are the kinds of things that that I'm
looking for, right, is this Like, I mean I like
(15:02):
getting paid, right, and I need to get paid. But
the reality is is at the end of the day,
I'm really looking for that place where I can just
knock it out of the park. So anyway, I decided
that I wanted to be a programmer, right because at MOSY,
I was still running the support I had hired at
(15:24):
that point like thirty people to work for me answering
support issues. But what I really love to do was
work on this system. And eventually we had built out
like a full ticketing system.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
We had added in a knowledge base, right.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
We tracked phone calls, I mean the whole nine yards
because they had brought in an Asterisk phone system which
ran on my SQL so we could query it from rails, right,
And so we were tracking all kinds of stuff. And
I was loving working on this system, and I was
I enjoy talking to people and helping him out over
(16:02):
the phone, but it just really wasn't the thing that
really lit me up. And for the really hairy stuff.
Since I had been there as long as I had
been and kind of touched every system, if somebody needed
to trouble shoot something for one of our larger clients
across the entire system, I was the person that was
pulled in and so I was kind of the last
(16:24):
resort for tech support. And then there were some political things,
and eventually I kind of got pushed off to the
side and they put somebody else in charge of the
support team, at which point I looked at him and said,
I want to be a programmer.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
What do I do?
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And we kind of compromised and I wound up in QA.
And I worked in QA for a while, and then
eventually I left because it just it wasn't worth it.
They had actually listed a job to hire a third
person for our QA team, and that person was getting
paid like twenty or thirty percent more than me, and
(16:59):
when I could in front of them about it and
asked them about it, anyway, it's not worth going into.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
But there were some political things that went on, and so.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I left, and then I kept hearing from the people
that were working for me about how bad things got afterward.
But I went on and I worked on another project.
This was for a lead end company, and there again
I got to mentor some people. I was, you know,
I didn't have any no. I went to the consulting
firm first, and let me tell you that, like this
(17:29):
was the perfect setup for me to launch my career from.
So there were a couple of things there, and I
feel like I've had this in a couple of other places,
and so I kind of want to talk about the
commonalities between this and a couple of other places where
I've worked, because it this is kind of the ideal setup,
and this is what I'm trying to create with JavaScript Geniuses,
(17:51):
is to give people all of these things that you
may or may not be getting wherever you're working. So
one of the first things that happened is, I guess
I went in for the interview. And when I went
in for the interview, I did the kind of the
who are you and what's your experience interview with the
general manager of the consulting firm, and then he got
(18:15):
their senior guy on the phone and we did the
technical interview over the phone. And so I'm sitting there
next to this general manager guy and I'm on the
phone with this other programmer, and so he's asking me questions,
and of course, right, I have how much experience do
I have in Ruby on rails? Well whatever I've been
(18:37):
able to pick up on my own working at Mosey, Right,
So so I answer the questions, and so he asked me, like,
what what are design patterns? And I'm like, I have
no freaking idea.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Right, So then he explains it to me, and then
I turn around and I say, oh, I gotcha.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So like, when rails makes you do things in this way,
that's a design pattern. He's like, yes, you know. And
so the interview kind of went like that. And so
the interview was not like I didn't show up knowing
all of the things that they wanted me to know.
I showed up basically with an open mind and was
(19:14):
willing to learn, and he would explain something to me
and I would immediately connect it to other things. And
so I wound up getting that job. I got basically
a twenty thousand dollars a year raise, and yeah, I
got to work there with a bunch of other guys. Now,
a lot of the guys at the company, there were
(19:34):
like two or three of us that were doing Ruby
on rails.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Most of the guys at the company.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Were doing Java or c sharp, and there were a
handful of people that were picking up Flash.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
And so.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
The deal was is I got onboarded onto the same
project as the guy that interviewed me, and so we
wound up doing I mean, we would pair a program
quite a bit. If I had any quest sessions about anything,
I literally would just call him and ask him and
he would walk.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Me through it.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
My IT experience allowed me to help out the rest
of the company with some of their stuff. Right, so
they had internal servers where they hosted the code using
SVN subversion, which was the predecessor to GET. Eventually everything
moved to GET but anyway, so all that work I
was able to do too. And Yeah, it was just
(20:27):
kind of an ideal setup because at the end of
the day, if I if I had something that I
needed to ask a question about, or I got stuck
on anything, I had somebody to talk to.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
And when I'm putting.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Things together for JavaScript geniuses, I want the same thing, right,
I want people to be able to come We're doing
weekly calls. I want people to be able to show
up and say, Hey, I've got a question. I ran
into this thing with react or express or whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
How do I handle this? How do I learn it?
How do I fix it? How do I whatever right?
Speaker 1 (21:00):
And be able to have people there to answer their
question and maybe walk through it, hold their hand through it.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
A little bit so, and that was a major thing.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
And what's funny is is, like I worked for Public Engines.
We ran crime reports dot com, which is if you
go there now it does the same thing, but it's
not the same app.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
But we.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
I worked with David Brady and he helped mentor me
on a whole bunch of stuff. Right at that point,
I was I was not in a place where I
had to ask questions all the time and you know,
have my hand held on stuff. But occasionally there were
some things where for example, when I was trying to
figure out if a point on the map, right, if
I had latitude and longitude was within the city limits
(21:46):
of the city that was giving us the crime data, right,
or if it was within a certain precinct of the city.
And so he's like, well, this is how we solve it, right,
And he just kind of explained the algorithm to me,
and it was up to me to actually build it right.
So it was stuff like that, or oh wow, I'm
running into this problem.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
He kept putting things into the tests.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Right, So I would go home at five and then
he would stay and work until seven or eight, and
the test would start failing at six o'clock because we
were GMT minus six and so the time zone stuff
was screwing up, right, And so he'd leave a note
for me in the test, Chuck, fix your crap. And
so I would go in and I would, you know,
(22:27):
I would make some changes and the test would pass,
and so I would go home. And that was like
a week and then finally, you know, he helped me
figure out what those issues were, right, And so having
that level of mentorship and having people that I could
kind of come along with really helped. The other version
of this that also made a major difference was I
started going to the users group, and so Utah had
(22:49):
a Utah Ruby Users Group. We're starting it up again,
but at the time we had one in Utah County,
which is where I lived. But I live basically all
the way up on the north end and so getting
to Salt Lake County is not really that big a deal.
They had another one in Salt Lake County on the
southern end of Salt Lake County. So again right, both
(23:09):
of these were within ten twenty minutes of my house.
They had one downtown, they had one in Davis County
or Weaver County, I can't remember. And then they had
one up in Cash County and Logan, which is like
two or three hours away from here, right, So I
hadn't go to all of them, but I would go
to the two that were closest to me and sometimes
(23:29):
get to downtown, which is half hour away in traffic.
So just having that, right, and so people would be
presenting on the latest stuff and you know, showing us
what they were doing and all of these things, right,
it was a great place to just go and just
compare notes. Another thing that worked out for me was
(23:52):
that in twenty eleven we started the Ruby Rogues podcast,
and so I wound up on this call every week,
initially with Aaron Patterson, James Edward Gray, David Brady, Peter Cooper,
and I think there was somebody else. And then Aaron
(24:16):
and Peter figured out pretty fast that showing up every
week was a little bit too much with everything else
they had going on, and so we wound up with
Avdy Grimm and Josh Susser came in and replaced those guys,
and so I was like the junior guy by years
in my career on a call every week with these guys,
and then whoever we got in as an expert right,
(24:38):
and so I could ask all my lower level questions
and I could get answers to him every week, and
I was talking to people who were up on the
latest things in Ruby right. And then six yeah, it
was eight months later, we started JavaScript jabber right, and
so I started picking up the same kinds of things
from there. And so I started a freelancing show at
(24:59):
the same time, because I had gone freelance in that
window in September of twenty eleven, and so again I
was getting that mentorship from guys that.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Had been doing it a whole lot longer than me.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
And so this is what I'm trying to create with
having the weekly calls is just to give people, hey, look,
we're going to bring in experts.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
We're going to have them walk through stuff. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
You'll be able to learn kind of like for what
I got from the podcast being on the podcast and
showing up to the users groups. And then you know,
if you get stuck or have any other questions, right,
we can stick around afterward. You know, I've scheduled these
calls to run for an hour and a half, but
we could stay a little longer if you know, if
our guest is done answering questions about what they're expert
(25:46):
in and just see if we can help you with
whatever you're running into. I've also played off and on
and it's probably gonna end up as an add on
for the coaching is having basically where you can text
me or send me a message on WhatsApp and say, hey, Chuck,
I'm stuck right, and then I can either answer it
because I know the answer, or because I've been doing
(26:08):
the podcast so long, I can reach out to the
people that I know and say, hey, so and so's
running into this issue, what do you think right, and
then they can point me in the right direction I
can give you an answer. So that's another piece of this,
right that kind of comes down to that mentorship level.
So anyway, that was a major thing, just just working
(26:28):
with Nate and then working with Dave. I actually worked
with Dave twice. I worked with him on a contract
later on and got the same kind of mentorship from
him and a couple of the other guys that were
working in that space. And that was on a financial
medical billing app right, So we got the best of
both worlds. We had to do HIPPA and we had
to do PCI compliance. But anyway, so that was that
(26:54):
was major thing for me. I also heard about a
conference that was going on Mountain West Ruby Conference. Mike
doesn't run it anymore, but I went out to that
right and it was in Salt Lake.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
So I just showed up early because I was so
excited to be there.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So I remember walking into the Salt Lake City Library
and sitting down in the auditorium right next to this
other guy that was sitting there, and you know, so
we start chatting, you know, and I'm like, yeah, I've
you know, I'm in my first programming job and you
know whatever, and so, you know, we start chatting, and
(27:33):
I was like, Okay, I've got a couple of programming
questions if you're willing to answer him, because you seem
like you know what you're doing. I didn't know he
was speaking at the conference, and so he, you know,
he answers a bunch of my questions. And then at
the end I figured out that this is who several
of my friends were excited to see at the conference.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
It was Jim Wyrick.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
And in the Ruby community, he had written about half
of the utilities to do the things that I was
asking him about and then you know, just being around people.
I got invited to go to dinner with a bunch
of you know, the speakers and stuff like that, just
because I knew enough of the right people to get
in the right rooms. And I have to say, I mean, really,
(28:17):
a lot of this is stuff that you all can do.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
And I'm also hoping to be able to put together
some of these.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Summits so that you know, if you can't afford to
travel to wherever the Ruby or the JavaScript conference is, right,
you can't make it to the React conference.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
You can't make it to the Angular conference. You can't, right,
It's like.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Hey, look, I just I can't afford the airfare, I
can't afford to take the time off. I can't afford
whatever right to give you the same kinds of opportunities
where it's hey, look, we're gonna you know, we're gonna
have talks. We're gonna have a hallway track, right, We're
gonna have you know, zoom calls where it's effectively you know,
I'm gonna sit down with a handful of other people
(28:58):
and we're just gonna chat over dinner, right, And so
we'll have some dinner groups and things like that, you know,
And so I'm looking to put that together too. That
won't be part of the membership, but you'll get a
discount if you have a membership, but just create those
right in the Ruby community. I'm looking to do the
same thing because Ruby Central, who has run Ruby Coff
(29:18):
and rails comp for the last I don't even know
how many years, twenty years, they announced that they weren't
going to run rails Comf anymore, that this year twenty
twenty five is going to be the last year. And
so what they said is we're not going to do
a Ruby coff this year, We're just doing rails cop
and then in twenty twenty six we're going to do
Ruby Cof only. And so what I want to do
(29:40):
is I want to put together a summit in the
fall as a kind of a replacement for Ruby Comf
this year and just say hey, look if you want
to come, right. But the other thing is is I
look at some of the other JavaScript conferences out there,
and I just want to make a lot more of that,
a lot more accessible, and not just on the level
of hey you can watch the talks, right, I really
(30:00):
want to give you an opportunity to go to the
conference and rub shoulders with people as much as you
can in a virtual environment. So anyway, but these are
the major wins that I got from this. And then
from there, as you know, Ruby Rogues took off as
some of this other stuff kind of came around, and
(30:21):
then I was able to go to some of the
bigger conferences.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Incidentally, my podcasting careers kind of followed the same trajectory
in a lot of ways because I got in with
enough of the right people early and had enough of
the right opportunities.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
To go to some of those big events.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I actually was one of the people that funded podcast Movement,
which is the big podcasting conference now when it started,
what twenty fourteen right in Dallas, Texas, right, and so
I got to rub shoulders with a whole bunch of them.
I already knew some of the people in the space
(31:00):
because we'd already been talking, and so again I just
I really want to give people the opportunity to get
to get to know each other and find these opportunities.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So, you know, let's fast forward a little bit.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
You know, one of the high end low points of
my more recent career was I worked at Morgan Stanley,
and because I'd done the podcast and because I had
been involved in the local community. It was right during
the COVID stuff, so everybody was working from home. Morgan
(31:37):
Stanley kept telling us that they were going to have
us come back to the office, but by the time
I left, they still hadn't and there were some political
things going on there too, And I'm not going to
get into all of that other than to say that
eventually we had enough people leave from the group that
I was working in that I had essentially taken on
project management, team lead and architecture for the application and
(32:04):
was just trying to.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Get it over the line because.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
It had started as a groovy on grails app and
they had never fully transitioned it, and.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
So I kept telling them, look, we lost the guy.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
That had written a lot of it in Grails, and
so I was saying, look, we just need to transition
this thing so we can even just maintain it. And
so you know, I was setting the priorities and working
through the processes and stuff until I eventually let them too.
But when I went in for the interview, the interview
(32:40):
essentially was them asking me all the questions about all
the people I knew from the podcast and talking to
me about what it was like to run the podcast
and stuff like that, they knew I was already capable.
And so that's one other thing that I would like
to kind of build into things, is to give you
all the opportunity to kind of raise your flag and
say say, hey, I'm capable of doing this stuff, and
(33:02):
you can know that by listening to my podcast or
watching my screencasts or things like.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
That, so that you can level up.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
And I guess I need to kind of rewind a
little bit because back in the early days of my
career there were screencast series. One in particular was Rails Casts,
and Ryan Bates was putting those out.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
He started with one a week.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
He eventually went to two a week if you wanted
to pay for the premium. I never quite understood why
he stopped doing it, because he was, you know that
two videos a week. He had like sixty thousand people
paying him, and so, you know, anyway, whatever the reasons were,
it was a huge, huge boon to the community, and
(33:53):
it made it really easy for people to figure out, Okay,
I want this kind of a thing. Here are a
couple of videos I can watch, and there are video
series out there. Now, what's funny to.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Me is I don't see as many of them in JavaScript.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
You know, I see courses on things like plural Site,
but I don't see anybody just putting out a weekly
video every week for something for JavaScript or React or anything.
And so I'm looking to create that as well. Right,
So for JavaScript geniuses, I want to build an application,
I want to put it up on cloud Flare workers
(34:27):
I'm looking at using super base on the back end. Right,
So it's all mostly just front end front end dish
right as much as possible, and just kind of make
it as d dost proof as possible. I'm fairly involved
in Utah politics, and when we ran our caucus night,
(34:47):
what we ran into was somebody who doesn't like the
caucus system de dosst our registration app, and so there
were some places that just had some issues getting people
registered for caucus that we're legitimately there as members of
the party, and so I just want to show people
(35:08):
how to solve that.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
It's like, hey, look, you know, if you.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Have a part of your app that you want to
peel off and make it so that it'll just run
no matter who's throwing what at it?
Speaker 2 (35:19):
You know, here's how you can use cloud Flare workers
to do it.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
I also want to dive a whole bunch into the
capabilities that are being built in now on the browsers
and on mobile browsers so that you can use like
Bluetooth and location services and stuff like that, and just
show you how to build all that stuff in so
that you have the PWA Progressive Web app that does
(35:45):
a lot of this work for you, so that maybe
you do or don't need a native mobile app, and
then if you do need one, then go bring something
in like Turbo Native or Cordova or something like that
where you can put a wrapper around your app and
get all that functionality without having to completely rewrite it
in something like React Native. But then at the same
(36:07):
time there are advantages to React Native, and so if
those advantages matter to you, you know, it gets into
that area. Well, it depends, right, Should I use this
or that? Well it depends right. And so give people
the capability of understanding, hey, you know you can do this,
you can do that, you can build these kinds of apps. Yeah,
(36:27):
I would love to just show people what you can
do as a programmer and just just open the gates
on all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
So that's the big direction I'm headed in. But yeah,
at the end of the day, it.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Also gives me the opportunity to learn some of this
stuff that I want to learn that I just it's like, Okay,
well I can go build a toy app. But I've
already explained to you that building a toy app just
isn't my jam, right. I want to build a real
app that makes a real difference for real people and
be able to mentor other people by showing, hey, this
is how I did it right that if you're stuck that,
(37:03):
well I got stuck there too, here's how you.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
On stick it.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
And so anyway, at the end of the day, that's
that's the thing that I'm looking to to build. So
I don't know that I have a whole lot else
to to really explain. I mean, everything's up at JavaScript
Geniuses dot com. And so I'm just gonna roll in.
I'm gonna throw you some picks and then we will
(37:29):
we'll call it a day. So I always do that
board game pick and so one of the picks I
want to pick this time is called Groundhog Day.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
It's based on the movie.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
So if you've ever seen Groundhog Day of the movie, right,
he wakes up every day and it he kind of
has to learn a new skill until he eventually has
the perfect day, right, and then and then he uh
and then he graduates, I guess, and.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
And and life goes on. Right.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
He gets the girl, he does the thing for work,
he gets all that stuff together.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
So it's a pretty simple game board game.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Keek has it as a way at a weight of
one point two two out of five, so, right, pretty simple,
pretty approachable game. I think we played it two or
three times in an hour, so, I mean just and
the first time was basically two of my friends explaining
(38:28):
to the rest of us how to play it.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
There were five of us playing, and yeah, it was.
It was pretty awesome. So effectively, what you wind up
doing is.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
You have so many days to beat the game, right,
I think they're like eight, eight or ten days, right,
And each day you get fewer and fewer cards that
you can play to have the perfect day.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
And the perfect day is you play.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
All red cards, and all the red cards are worth
four stars, and so each day you have to get
more stars than the previous day, right, so the gray
cards have zero stars, the the blue cards have one star,
the what was it orange cards had two stars, and
then there were there was another color that had three
stars and they were yellow and so or hearts. They
(39:21):
were hearts, not stars, but anyway, so each day has
to have progressively more hearts. When you play a card
on a day, it has to be higher than the
previous card played on that day. There's six cards in
a day and anyway, so so you kind of play
off all your lower value cards first, and there's you
don't take turns. So if you've got the next so
(39:42):
you know, somebody plays the one of gray and you
have the two of gray, you just played the two
of gray, And I mean that's kind of how it
all goes. So you just play it out and try
and get that perfect day. It took us a couple
of tries to kind to really figure it out, because
if nobody has a card.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
That you can play to complete the day, then you lose.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
If you can't make it add up to more hearts
than the previous day, you lose, right, And some of
the yellow cards give you more red cards, and so
you can't win without playing some of the yellow cards.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
But anyway, if you don't solve it by that last day,
you lose.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
And basically the way that we played it was that
we didn't we wouldn't play any of the red cards
until we felt like and you can't talk to each other,
so you just kind of have to guess. But you know,
we wouldn't play the red cards until we felt like
we had a decent shot of making it based on
(40:47):
where everybody was at, so you know, everybody's kind of
calculating the odds in their head. Okay, do we have
seven red cards between all of our hands, and you know,
what are the odds that we can get them out
in the right order. So anyway, it was fun. It
was really really fun. I really enjoyed it. So I'm
(41:08):
gonna go ahead and pick Groundhog Day.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
The game.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
And the movie's funny too, so definitely definitely worth checking
out there. So let me paste it in here so
that we can keep track of it. But yeah, and
then we played more of the Gang. I think I
picked that last week, which is the kind of the
poker game where you're playing Texas Holding poker as a
(41:36):
team and you're trying to get everybody in the order
you know, from the best hand to the worst hand. Incidentally,
when we played it this last time, there were five
of us playing and one of the hands, one guy
had like two pair, and then everybody else's hand was
(42:00):
effectively the same, and so all that had really mattered
was that the first the guy that took the five
star chip got the five star chip, because the rest
of us.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
What you do is you you score your.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Hand based on Okay, I've got this many pairs or
you know, and and then the number of the pairs
and then it's just whatever your higher cards are.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
But it turned out that.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
The the the hand that was on the table was
the best hand for four of us, right the cards
that we had in our in our pocket, the two
pocket cards didn't change the hand we had because they
were so low. And so that was kind of funny
because we were like, okay, who's next, and it was like, well,
he's next because he has the higher the next high
(42:46):
you know, he has the next highest card. But then
I was like, no, because his highest card doesn't figure
onto the texas hold the hand anyway, So that was fun.
The gang is a fun one. A couple of other picks.
My wife and I have and watching The Night Agent.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
It's funny because a lot of times, if I can
find some criticism like what I have for the show,
I tend to not like it as much. But I'm
really enjoying this one in spite of it. What I'm
finding is that a lot of the stuff in this
show is fairly predictable, right, It's fairly formulaic.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
But I'm enjoying it anyway, So definitely check out The
Night Agent. We're watching the second season.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
I feel like the first season was a little bit
less formulaic, just because the main protagonist wasn't like a
trained operative, and so, you know, there was a lot
of luck by the seat of your pants kind of stuff.
So anyway, what else do I have to pick? I
(43:55):
think that's about all I've got, So I'm gonna go
ahead and wrap it up here. I really appreciate you
sitting through this episode, and until next time, next out,
mm hmm.
Hey, folks, welcome back to another episode of JavaScript Jabber
now here in.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Oh what is that? Sorry?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I'm using a system that I haven't used in a while,
and it's got new features. So it just popped up
and said, hey, you've got your live So I guess
we're live on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and riverside if you
want to come watch us on the app or recording
on so anyway, it's just me because it's a holiday
(00:37):
here in the US, and so AJ and Steve apparently
have other things going on and didn't show up. Dan
said he has very good reasons for not being here,
usually has very good reasons when he's not here. And
our guest, honestly, we just switched over to this system,
and so I am going to chalk that up to
essentially accounting or pros us error. Right, he probably tried
(01:03):
to go to the stream yard link. That's some kind
of messed up. They actually lost some of our recordings
when we switched, because I guess they're happy with us
for switching here.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I shouldn't imply any motives because I don't actually know
if it was malice or in confidence, but I'm working
with them to try and figure it out, and they
basically told me to quit asking for help. So we'll
see how all of that goes. But we switched from
stream yard or to Riverside, and it turns out Riverside
has pretty much all the features that I've been asking
stream Yard for so and they're cheaper. So at the
(01:40):
end of the day's that I'm not sad that we switched.
If you're looking to do more live streaming than Streamyard
does have better features. But it looks like riversides features
have come a long way since we switched off of them,
and it wasn't terribly hard to hoo cut up. So
I'm pretty happy here and maybe we'll dive into that,
(02:01):
or maybe I'll do an episode on how to record podcasts.
But in the meantime, since no one showed up, I thought, hey,
I'm just gonna get on and I'm just going.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
To record and just talk about some war stories or
you know.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Essentially, what I wanted to do is just talk about
the highlights of my career. And I don't want to
just get into hey, look how great I am. What
I want to do is I want to talk about, Hey,
I was in these positions and these were the things
that really helped me get ahead, or these were the
things that really helped me learn, or things like that.
And that way I can kind of give you ideas
(02:36):
if you're feeling stuck, or if you're like, why am
I not happy in this job? Or you know, whatever,
you know, just give you a chance to hear oh,
oh okay, maybe I should try that right, or maybe
I should take this kind of a leap, or things
like that. So just to give a little bit of background,
(03:00):
I took electronics classes in high school and that was
kind of my thing, and I really enjoyed it. We
actually did get into programming some eighty eighty five or
eighty eighty eight chips, right, so we would write programs
and it would make LEDs light up, right, And so
we were programming the native language of the eighty eighty eight,
(03:20):
which was assembly language. And you know, we also built
some robots that would follow a line and things like that,
and so I've always kind of had that bent toward technology.
My grandpa actually was an inventor, and he invented a
(03:41):
smaller ellipsometer, which is a device that tests the elect
or the oxidation coating on silicon wafers that are used
to make chips, right, they have to be uniform or
pretty close to uniform, and we're talking. The term he
always used was angst, which is like the thickness of
(04:01):
a what of an oxygen atom or something. I can't
remember which atom it is, but you know, so it
had to be it had to be that accurate on
the coating or you get bad chips. And so he
invented a system that would do. They had ellipsometers, but
they would take a long time. They were really slow,
(04:22):
and they were really big, and he he invented one
that fit basically in the size of kind of a
computer case, and he could swap the wafers out every
few minutes, right, so instead of taking hours to take minutes.
He also was involved in the after the Challenger the
(04:44):
shuttle blew up in the eighties. He was working for
a company called Rockwell International, and he he invented a
laser system that checked the inside of the solid rocket
booster for impre because apparently that contributed to the O
rings failing. And so anyway, he had pictures up in
(05:07):
his office of this device that was sitting and pointed
at the side of the rocket boosters. So anyway, so
I came across all of the interest in tech kind
of honestly, right, he kind of took me under his wing,
and you know, and so I was always interested in
(05:27):
this kind of a thing. And he invented some other
stuff that I don't know that anybody would ever use.
He built himself literally this chair. So he liked to
fly remote control airplanes, which honestly is something that I
think would be fun to get into.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
But he built himself a chair, and he built himself.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Like the yoke for the pilot's chair, so it was
a pilot's chair, and he built it so that it
had polleys and stuff in it so that he could
put the remote in there and he could fly the
airplane as if he were the pilot, right, And so
he could turn the yoke and he could pull it in.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
And out to make it go up and down.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
And anyway, I have fond memories of climbing trees to
retrieve his airplanes at the remote control airplane parks. But anyway,
so I got into that in high school. We were
building that stuff. And then after high school, when I
went to college, I signed up as an electrical engineering major.
(06:29):
I went on a two year mission to Italy, and
I lived in Italy for two years and taught the gospel.
That's not really relevant to this, but if you're Italian
and you want to chat, I would love to practice
my Italian. But yeah, So then I came back and
I started working on my degree for electrical engineering. And
(06:50):
as I got further in some of the classes that
they make you take or more related to chip design
and how computers work and things like that, and I
enjoyed that a whole lot.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
More more than some of the just esoteric and you know.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Deeper electrical engineering stuff. So I changed my major to
computer engineering. I had to take some computer science classes
as part of either major, and so I, you know,
I picked up some programming in college. I also did
some programming on an eighty eighty five or a TI
eighty five calculator that I had when I was in
(07:24):
junior high but it was mostly just so I could
do my homework and do it faster than just punching
everything in. But yeah, so I started taking these classes,
and I have to say that after taking that many
computer science classes, I knew for a fact I didn't
want to be a programmer. Which is kind of funny
to a lot of people. It's like, oh really, yeah,
(07:47):
I was not so keen on that. I got a
job working it at the university and so I set
up probably dozens of Linux servers and Windows servers in
the data center the first few years I worked there.
I actually worked in the data center, and so we
would monitor batch jobs and you know, get into the
(08:07):
computers and run commands and stuff like that, so you know,
help just maintain the network. So and so is having
an issue on the networks, so we'd get in and
check the configuration on the switches across campus and things
like that. So I do have kind of a strong
bent and pretty pretty good familiarity with the command line,
(08:29):
and that has really served me well over the years.
If you're looking for a skill set that a lot
of programmers don't have a good basis in that will
help you out long term, boy, I can tell you
learning the command line and learning how Linux works.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Will do you a world of good.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
And it's translated really nicely into areas like Docker. So
you know, just putting it out there, if that's something
that you're looking to, you know, it's like, okay, what
can I learn that makes me more competitive and you know,
a better.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Programmer and things like that.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Anyway, Yeah, that's that that was something that really made
a big difference. So anyway, so that's that kind of
gives you some background. Before I got that first job,
and incidentally, that job out of college, so I had
some other jobs. I left the IT job to go
take an internship where I was actually writing patent applications
because I thought I wanted to be a patent attorney.
(09:29):
And yeah, I figured out real quick that that wasn't
really my cup of tea. So I went back worked
in IT a little longer, setting up servers things like that.
We used VMware on the servers and so we got
multiple servers on the same hardware. And then I got
hired at Mosey and Mosey. I was working for them
(09:51):
answering support, mostly emails. They expanded they put out a
pro product for businesses, and so then we were doing
phone calls as well. And this is where I really
got into programming, and I figured out that I loved programming.
And the difference was was that we had this problem where.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
We needed to.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Be able to keep better track because there were two
of us and we were answering emails in Thunderbird, which
is an email client, and so what we would do
is we would just grab the next unread or unreplied.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And we would start working on it.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
And sometimes we would figure out that the other guy
was working on it too, and we were getting enough
support requests to where we were starting to need other people,
and so we were going to have to hire a team.
And so it just wasn't going to work, and so
we went to our boss, who incidentally we found out
later that were related. His mom and my mom are cousins,
(10:53):
but we just hadn't really done anything with his family
because they lived in California and we lived in Utah.
But anyway, so we went to him and we said, hey, look,
you know, we need something better to manage the emails
coming in and stuff like that. And he looked at
us and basically said that he didn't have budget for it,
and so we started building it. And the technology that
(11:13):
they were using at at Mosey for the web based
technology was Ruby on Rails, and so we started building
the system in Ruby on Rails and essentially what we
would it would do is it would ingest the emails
periodically and then what it would do is if one
of us loaded the email, it would put a mutex
(11:36):
or you know, or basically lock it for ten minutes
or something on the server on the database, so that
if I opened the email, he wouldn't open it.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Right and for ten minutes.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
And so then if I replied, then it would be
Marcus replied, and he would you know, he would never
see it the other guy. And so then when we
hired more people than they could just get in and
they could do it well. It also turned out that
like eighty percent of the people who were requesting help
were also requesting the same probably handful of issues, and
so we put in canned replies and we basically said, hey,
(12:16):
look we're you know, here's here's your answer.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So that was that was the deal.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
But what was really interesting was that the issue that
I had with the with programming and the reason I
didn't want to be a programmer based on my computer
science stuff, was that I wasn't solving real problems, right,
I had no stake in it other than my grade,
and some of the problems felt kind.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Of contrived, right.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
It was like, hey, we're going to make up a
problem for you to solve that nobody cares about, right,
And so I didn't feel like I was making a difference.
And I realized working for MOSY that that was something.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
That I really cared about.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
And so when I talked to people now about their
careers and where they're going and what they want to
learn and things like that, is like, look, you know
what what gives you fulfillment at work?
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Right?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Because some people I've figured out and for me some
of this applies. But the biggest thing for me is
I want to feel like I'm making a difference. So
for me, usually I'm looking for opportunities to mentor other
people I'm using. I'm looking for opportunities to save a
big pile of money for my employer. Right, it's like, hey,
we made the application, you know, six times more efficient,
(13:29):
so you don't have to pay for you know whatever
server and other the other the other systems. Right, you
don't have to pay for all of that, right, So,
or you know, we clean up the code, right, and
so it's like, hey, we can get we can get
the programming done faster when we need new features, or
(13:52):
it's more easy to maintain, or we catch more bugs.
And because we have a better test suite or things
like that. Right, So for me, it's I really want
to move the needle. I want somebody to look at
the work I did and say wow, that that changed
the complexion of things for us. Right, So in the contract,
I'm working right now, right, they we figured out that
(14:14):
it was doing a whole bunch of repeat work in
the workers.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
That were you know, it's like, hey, do this job.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Well, it turned out that a lot of times when
it said hey, do this job, effectively what it was
doing is it was it was saying do this work,
but the work was going to be done by a
job that was already in the queue. And so I
set it up to just look in the queue and say,
are you already going to do this work?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Okay, don't schedule it.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
And we got less complaints from from the client, right
because they're like, it's not calculating all the time, right,
It's it's telling us it actually finished the calculation so
we can use the numbers that are in there. This
is for a hedge fund, by the way, So so
so those are the kinds of things that that I'm
looking for, right, is this Like, I mean I like
(15:02):
getting paid, right, and I need to get paid. But
the reality is is at the end of the day,
I'm really looking for that place where I can just
knock it out of the park. So anyway, I decided
that I wanted to be a programmer, right because at MOSY,
I was still running the support I had hired at
(15:24):
that point like thirty people to work for me answering
support issues. But what I really love to do was
work on this system. And eventually we had built out
like a full ticketing system.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
We had added in a knowledge base, right.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
We tracked phone calls, I mean the whole nine yards
because they had brought in an Asterisk phone system which
ran on my SQL so we could query it from rails, right,
And so we were tracking all kinds of stuff. And
I was loving working on this system, and I was
I enjoy talking to people and helping him out over
(16:02):
the phone, but it just really wasn't the thing that
really lit me up. And for the really hairy stuff.
Since I had been there as long as I had
been and kind of touched every system, if somebody needed
to trouble shoot something for one of our larger clients
across the entire system, I was the person that was
pulled in and so I was kind of the last
(16:24):
resort for tech support. And then there were some political things,
and eventually I kind of got pushed off to the
side and they put somebody else in charge of the
support team, at which point I looked at him and said,
I want to be a programmer.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
What do I do?
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And we kind of compromised and I wound up in QA.
And I worked in QA for a while, and then
eventually I left because it just it wasn't worth it.
They had actually listed a job to hire a third
person for our QA team, and that person was getting
paid like twenty or thirty percent more than me, and
(16:59):
when I could in front of them about it and
asked them about it, anyway, it's not worth going into.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
But there were some political things that went on, and so.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I left, and then I kept hearing from the people
that were working for me about how bad things got afterward.
But I went on and I worked on another project.
This was for a lead end company, and there again
I got to mentor some people. I was, you know,
I didn't have any no. I went to the consulting
firm first, and let me tell you that, like this
(17:29):
was the perfect setup for me to launch my career from.
So there were a couple of things there, and I
feel like I've had this in a couple of other places,
and so I kind of want to talk about the
commonalities between this and a couple of other places where
I've worked, because it this is kind of the ideal setup,
and this is what I'm trying to create with JavaScript Geniuses,
(17:51):
is to give people all of these things that you
may or may not be getting wherever you're working. So
one of the first things that happened is, I guess
I went in for the interview. And when I went
in for the interview, I did the kind of the
who are you and what's your experience interview with the
general manager of the consulting firm, and then he got
(18:15):
their senior guy on the phone and we did the
technical interview over the phone. And so I'm sitting there
next to this general manager guy and I'm on the
phone with this other programmer, and so he's asking me questions,
and of course, right, I have how much experience do
I have in Ruby on rails? Well whatever I've been
(18:37):
able to pick up on my own working at Mosey, Right,
So so I answer the questions, and so he asked me, like,
what what are design patterns? And I'm like, I have
no freaking idea.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Right, So then he explains it to me, and then
I turn around and I say, oh, I gotcha.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So like, when rails makes you do things in this way,
that's a design pattern. He's like, yes, you know. And
so the interview kind of went like that. And so
the interview was not like I didn't show up knowing
all of the things that they wanted me to know.
I showed up basically with an open mind and was
(19:14):
willing to learn, and he would explain something to me
and I would immediately connect it to other things. And
so I wound up getting that job. I got basically
a twenty thousand dollars a year raise, and yeah, I
got to work there with a bunch of other guys. Now,
a lot of the guys at the company, there were
(19:34):
like two or three of us that were doing Ruby
on rails.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Most of the guys at the company.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Were doing Java or c sharp, and there were a
handful of people that were picking up Flash.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
And so.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
The deal was is I got onboarded onto the same
project as the guy that interviewed me, and so we
wound up doing I mean, we would pair a program
quite a bit. If I had any quest sessions about anything,
I literally would just call him and ask him and
he would walk.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Me through it.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
My IT experience allowed me to help out the rest
of the company with some of their stuff. Right, so
they had internal servers where they hosted the code using
SVN subversion, which was the predecessor to GET. Eventually everything
moved to GET but anyway, so all that work I
was able to do too. And Yeah, it was just
(20:27):
kind of an ideal setup because at the end of
the day, if I if I had something that I
needed to ask a question about, or I got stuck
on anything, I had somebody to talk to.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
And when I'm putting.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Things together for JavaScript geniuses, I want the same thing, right,
I want people to be able to come We're doing
weekly calls. I want people to be able to show
up and say, Hey, I've got a question. I ran
into this thing with react or express or whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
How do I handle this? How do I learn it?
How do I fix it? How do I whatever right?
Speaker 1 (21:00):
And be able to have people there to answer their
question and maybe walk through it, hold their hand through it.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
A little bit so, and that was a major thing.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
And what's funny is is, like I worked for Public Engines.
We ran crime reports dot com, which is if you
go there now it does the same thing, but it's
not the same app.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
But we.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
I worked with David Brady and he helped mentor me
on a whole bunch of stuff. Right at that point,
I was I was not in a place where I
had to ask questions all the time and you know,
have my hand held on stuff. But occasionally there were
some things where for example, when I was trying to
figure out if a point on the map, right, if
I had latitude and longitude was within the city limits
(21:46):
of the city that was giving us the crime data, right,
or if it was within a certain precinct of the city.
And so he's like, well, this is how we solve it, right,
And he just kind of explained the algorithm to me,
and it was up to me to actually build it right.
So it was stuff like that, or oh wow, I'm
running into this problem.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
He kept putting things into the tests.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Right, So I would go home at five and then
he would stay and work until seven or eight, and
the test would start failing at six o'clock because we
were GMT minus six and so the time zone stuff
was screwing up, right, And so he'd leave a note
for me in the test, Chuck, fix your crap. And
so I would go in and I would, you know,
(22:27):
I would make some changes and the test would pass,
and so I would go home. And that was like
a week and then finally, you know, he helped me
figure out what those issues were, right, And so having
that level of mentorship and having people that I could
kind of come along with really helped. The other version
of this that also made a major difference was I
started going to the users group, and so Utah had
(22:49):
a Utah Ruby Users Group. We're starting it up again,
but at the time we had one in Utah County,
which is where I lived. But I live basically all
the way up on the north end and so getting
to Salt Lake County is not really that big a deal.
They had another one in Salt Lake County on the
southern end of Salt Lake County. So again right, both
(23:09):
of these were within ten twenty minutes of my house.
They had one downtown, they had one in Davis County
or Weaver County, I can't remember. And then they had
one up in Cash County and Logan, which is like
two or three hours away from here, right, So I
hadn't go to all of them, but I would go
to the two that were closest to me and sometimes
(23:29):
get to downtown, which is half hour away in traffic.
So just having that, right, and so people would be
presenting on the latest stuff and you know, showing us
what they were doing and all of these things, right,
it was a great place to just go and just
compare notes. Another thing that worked out for me was
(23:52):
that in twenty eleven we started the Ruby Rogues podcast,
and so I wound up on this call every week,
initially with Aaron Patterson, James Edward Gray, David Brady, Peter Cooper,
and I think there was somebody else. And then Aaron
(24:16):
and Peter figured out pretty fast that showing up every
week was a little bit too much with everything else
they had going on, and so we wound up with
Avdy Grimm and Josh Susser came in and replaced those guys,
and so I was like the junior guy by years
in my career on a call every week with these guys,
and then whoever we got in as an expert right,
(24:38):
and so I could ask all my lower level questions
and I could get answers to him every week, and
I was talking to people who were up on the
latest things in Ruby right. And then six yeah, it
was eight months later, we started JavaScript jabber right, and
so I started picking up the same kinds of things
from there. And so I started a freelancing show at
(24:59):
the same time, because I had gone freelance in that
window in September of twenty eleven, and so again I
was getting that mentorship from guys that.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Had been doing it a whole lot longer than me.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
And so this is what I'm trying to create with
having the weekly calls is just to give people, hey, look,
we're going to bring in experts.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
We're going to have them walk through stuff. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
You'll be able to learn kind of like for what
I got from the podcast being on the podcast and
showing up to the users groups. And then you know,
if you get stuck or have any other questions, right,
we can stick around afterward. You know, I've scheduled these
calls to run for an hour and a half, but
we could stay a little longer if you know, if
our guest is done answering questions about what they're expert
(25:46):
in and just see if we can help you with
whatever you're running into. I've also played off and on
and it's probably gonna end up as an add on
for the coaching is having basically where you can text
me or send me a message on WhatsApp and say, hey, Chuck,
I'm stuck right, and then I can either answer it
because I know the answer, or because I've been doing
(26:08):
the podcast so long, I can reach out to the
people that I know and say, hey, so and so's
running into this issue, what do you think right, and
then they can point me in the right direction I
can give you an answer. So that's another piece of this,
right that kind of comes down to that mentorship level.
So anyway, that was a major thing, just just working
(26:28):
with Nate and then working with Dave. I actually worked
with Dave twice. I worked with him on a contract
later on and got the same kind of mentorship from
him and a couple of the other guys that were
working in that space. And that was on a financial
medical billing app right, So we got the best of
both worlds. We had to do HIPPA and we had
to do PCI compliance. But anyway, so that was that
(26:54):
was major thing for me. I also heard about a
conference that was going on Mountain West Ruby Conference. Mike
doesn't run it anymore, but I went out to that
right and it was in Salt Lake.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
So I just showed up early because I was so
excited to be there.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
So I remember walking into the Salt Lake City Library
and sitting down in the auditorium right next to this
other guy that was sitting there, and you know, so
we start chatting, you know, and I'm like, yeah, I've
you know, I'm in my first programming job and you
know whatever, and so, you know, we start chatting, and
(27:33):
I was like, Okay, I've got a couple of programming
questions if you're willing to answer him, because you seem
like you know what you're doing. I didn't know he
was speaking at the conference, and so he, you know,
he answers a bunch of my questions. And then at
the end I figured out that this is who several
of my friends were excited to see at the conference.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
It was Jim Wyrick.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
And in the Ruby community, he had written about half
of the utilities to do the things that I was
asking him about and then you know, just being around people.
I got invited to go to dinner with a bunch
of you know, the speakers and stuff like that, just
because I knew enough of the right people to get
in the right rooms. And I have to say, I mean, really,
(28:17):
a lot of this is stuff that you all can do.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
And I'm also hoping to be able to put together
some of these.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
Summits so that you know, if you can't afford to
travel to wherever the Ruby or the JavaScript conference is, right,
you can't make it to the React conference.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
You can't make it to the Angular conference. You can't, right,
It's like.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Hey, look, I just I can't afford the airfare, I
can't afford to take the time off. I can't afford
whatever right to give you the same kinds of opportunities
where it's hey, look, we're gonna you know, we're gonna
have talks. We're gonna have a hallway track, right, We're
gonna have you know, zoom calls where it's effectively you know,
I'm gonna sit down with a handful of other people
(28:58):
and we're just gonna chat over dinner, right, And so
we'll have some dinner groups and things like that, you know,
And so I'm looking to put that together too. That
won't be part of the membership, but you'll get a
discount if you have a membership, but just create those
right in the Ruby community. I'm looking to do the
same thing because Ruby Central, who has run Ruby Coff
(29:18):
and rails comp for the last I don't even know
how many years, twenty years, they announced that they weren't
going to run rails Comf anymore, that this year twenty
twenty five is going to be the last year. And
so what they said is we're not going to do
a Ruby coff this year, We're just doing rails cop
and then in twenty twenty six we're going to do
Ruby Cof only. And so what I want to do
(29:40):
is I want to put together a summit in the
fall as a kind of a replacement for Ruby Comf
this year and just say hey, look if you want
to come, right. But the other thing is is I
look at some of the other JavaScript conferences out there,
and I just want to make a lot more of that,
a lot more accessible, and not just on the level
of hey you can watch the talks, right, I really
(30:00):
want to give you an opportunity to go to the
conference and rub shoulders with people as much as you
can in a virtual environment. So anyway, but these are
the major wins that I got from this. And then
from there, as you know, Ruby Rogues took off as
some of this other stuff kind of came around, and
(30:21):
then I was able to go to some of the
bigger conferences.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Incidentally, my podcasting careers kind of followed the same trajectory
in a lot of ways because I got in with
enough of the right people early and had enough of
the right opportunities.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
To go to some of those big events.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I actually was one of the people that funded podcast Movement,
which is the big podcasting conference now when it started,
what twenty fourteen right in Dallas, Texas, right, and so
I got to rub shoulders with a whole bunch of them.
I already knew some of the people in the space
(31:00):
because we'd already been talking, and so again I just
I really want to give people the opportunity to get
to get to know each other and find these opportunities.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So, you know, let's fast forward a little bit.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
You know, one of the high end low points of
my more recent career was I worked at Morgan Stanley,
and because I'd done the podcast and because I had
been involved in the local community. It was right during
the COVID stuff, so everybody was working from home. Morgan
(31:37):
Stanley kept telling us that they were going to have
us come back to the office, but by the time
I left, they still hadn't and there were some political
things going on there too, And I'm not going to
get into all of that other than to say that
eventually we had enough people leave from the group that
I was working in that I had essentially taken on
project management, team lead and architecture for the application and
(32:04):
was just trying to.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Get it over the line because.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
It had started as a groovy on grails app and
they had never fully transitioned it, and.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
So I kept telling them, look, we lost the guy.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
That had written a lot of it in Grails, and
so I was saying, look, we just need to transition
this thing so we can even just maintain it. And
so you know, I was setting the priorities and working
through the processes and stuff until I eventually let them too.
But when I went in for the interview, the interview
(32:40):
essentially was them asking me all the questions about all
the people I knew from the podcast and talking to
me about what it was like to run the podcast
and stuff like that, they knew I was already capable.
And so that's one other thing that I would like
to kind of build into things, is to give you
all the opportunity to kind of raise your flag and
say say, hey, I'm capable of doing this stuff, and
(33:02):
you can know that by listening to my podcast or
watching my screencasts or things like.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
That, so that you can level up.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
And I guess I need to kind of rewind a
little bit because back in the early days of my
career there were screencast series. One in particular was Rails Casts,
and Ryan Bates was putting those out.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
He started with one a week.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
He eventually went to two a week if you wanted
to pay for the premium. I never quite understood why
he stopped doing it, because he was, you know that
two videos a week. He had like sixty thousand people
paying him, and so, you know, anyway, whatever the reasons were,
it was a huge, huge boon to the community, and
(33:53):
it made it really easy for people to figure out, Okay,
I want this kind of a thing. Here are a
couple of videos I can watch, and there are video
series out there. Now, what's funny to.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Me is I don't see as many of them in JavaScript.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
You know, I see courses on things like plural Site,
but I don't see anybody just putting out a weekly
video every week for something for JavaScript or React or anything.
And so I'm looking to create that as well. Right,
So for JavaScript geniuses, I want to build an application,
I want to put it up on cloud Flare workers
(34:27):
I'm looking at using super base on the back end. Right,
So it's all mostly just front end front end dish
right as much as possible, and just kind of make
it as d dost proof as possible. I'm fairly involved
in Utah politics, and when we ran our caucus night,
(34:47):
what we ran into was somebody who doesn't like the
caucus system de dosst our registration app, and so there
were some places that just had some issues getting people
registered for caucus that we're legitimately there as members of
the party, and so I just want to show people
(35:08):
how to solve that.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
It's like, hey, look, you know, if you.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Have a part of your app that you want to
peel off and make it so that it'll just run
no matter who's throwing what at it?
Speaker 2 (35:19):
You know, here's how you can use cloud Flare workers
to do it.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
I also want to dive a whole bunch into the
capabilities that are being built in now on the browsers
and on mobile browsers so that you can use like
Bluetooth and location services and stuff like that, and just
show you how to build all that stuff in so
that you have the PWA Progressive Web app that does
(35:45):
a lot of this work for you, so that maybe
you do or don't need a native mobile app, and
then if you do need one, then go bring something
in like Turbo Native or Cordova or something like that
where you can put a wrapper around your app and
get all that functionality without having to completely rewrite it
in something like React Native. But then at the same
(36:07):
time there are advantages to React Native, and so if
those advantages matter to you, you know, it gets into
that area. Well, it depends, right, Should I use this
or that? Well it depends right. And so give people
the capability of understanding, hey, you know you can do this,
you can do that, you can build these kinds of apps. Yeah,
(36:27):
I would love to just show people what you can
do as a programmer and just just open the gates
on all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
So that's the big direction I'm headed in. But yeah,
at the end of the day, it.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Also gives me the opportunity to learn some of this
stuff that I want to learn that I just it's like, Okay,
well I can go build a toy app. But I've
already explained to you that building a toy app just
isn't my jam, right. I want to build a real
app that makes a real difference for real people and
be able to mentor other people by showing, hey, this
is how I did it right that if you're stuck that,
(37:03):
well I got stuck there too, here's how you.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
On stick it.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
And so anyway, at the end of the day, that's
that's the thing that I'm looking to to build. So
I don't know that I have a whole lot else
to to really explain. I mean, everything's up at JavaScript
Geniuses dot com. And so I'm just gonna roll in.
I'm gonna throw you some picks and then we will
(37:29):
we'll call it a day. So I always do that
board game pick and so one of the picks I
want to pick this time is called Groundhog Day.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
It's based on the movie.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
So if you've ever seen Groundhog Day of the movie, right,
he wakes up every day and it he kind of
has to learn a new skill until he eventually has
the perfect day, right, and then and then he uh
and then he graduates, I guess, and.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
And and life goes on. Right.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
He gets the girl, he does the thing for work,
he gets all that stuff together.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
So it's a pretty simple game board game.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Keek has it as a way at a weight of
one point two two out of five, so, right, pretty simple,
pretty approachable game. I think we played it two or
three times in an hour, so, I mean just and
the first time was basically two of my friends explaining
(38:28):
to the rest of us how to play it.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
There were five of us playing, and yeah, it was.
It was pretty awesome. So effectively, what you wind up
doing is.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
You have so many days to beat the game, right,
I think they're like eight, eight or ten days, right,
And each day you get fewer and fewer cards that
you can play to have the perfect day.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
And the perfect day is you play.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
All red cards, and all the red cards are worth
four stars, and so each day you have to get
more stars than the previous day, right, so the gray
cards have zero stars, the the blue cards have one star,
the what was it orange cards had two stars, and
then there were there was another color that had three
stars and they were yellow and so or hearts. They
(39:21):
were hearts, not stars, but anyway, so each day has
to have progressively more hearts. When you play a card
on a day, it has to be higher than the
previous card played on that day. There's six cards in
a day and anyway, so so you kind of play
off all your lower value cards first, and there's you
don't take turns. So if you've got the next so
(39:42):
you know, somebody plays the one of gray and you
have the two of gray, you just played the two
of gray, And I mean that's kind of how it
all goes. So you just play it out and try
and get that perfect day. It took us a couple
of tries to kind to really figure it out, because
if nobody has a card.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
That you can play to complete the day, then you lose.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
If you can't make it add up to more hearts
than the previous day, you lose, right, And some of
the yellow cards give you more red cards, and so
you can't win without playing some of the yellow cards.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
But anyway, if you don't solve it by that last day,
you lose.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
And basically the way that we played it was that
we didn't we wouldn't play any of the red cards
until we felt like and you can't talk to each other,
so you just kind of have to guess. But you know,
we wouldn't play the red cards until we felt like
we had a decent shot of making it based on
(40:47):
where everybody was at, so you know, everybody's kind of
calculating the odds in their head. Okay, do we have
seven red cards between all of our hands, and you know,
what are the odds that we can get them out
in the right order. So anyway, it was fun. It
was really really fun. I really enjoyed it. So I'm
(41:08):
gonna go ahead and pick Groundhog Day.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
The game.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
And the movie's funny too, so definitely definitely worth checking
out there. So let me paste it in here so
that we can keep track of it. But yeah, and
then we played more of the Gang. I think I
picked that last week, which is the kind of the
poker game where you're playing Texas Holding poker as a
(41:36):
team and you're trying to get everybody in the order
you know, from the best hand to the worst hand. Incidentally,
when we played it this last time, there were five
of us playing and one of the hands, one guy
had like two pair, and then everybody else's hand was
(42:00):
effectively the same, and so all that had really mattered
was that the first the guy that took the five
star chip got the five star chip, because the rest
of us.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
What you do is you you score your.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Hand based on Okay, I've got this many pairs or
you know, and and then the number of the pairs
and then it's just whatever your higher cards are.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
But it turned out that.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
The the the hand that was on the table was
the best hand for four of us, right the cards
that we had in our in our pocket, the two
pocket cards didn't change the hand we had because they
were so low. And so that was kind of funny
because we were like, okay, who's next, and it was like, well,
he's next because he has the higher the next high
(42:46):
you know, he has the next highest card. But then
I was like, no, because his highest card doesn't figure
onto the texas hold the hand anyway, So that was fun.
The gang is a fun one. A couple of other picks.
My wife and I have and watching The Night Agent.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
It's funny because a lot of times, if I can
find some criticism like what I have for the show,
I tend to not like it as much. But I'm
really enjoying this one in spite of it. What I'm
finding is that a lot of the stuff in this
show is fairly predictable, right, It's fairly formulaic.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
But I'm enjoying it anyway, So definitely check out The
Night Agent. We're watching the second season.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
I feel like the first season was a little bit
less formulaic, just because the main protagonist wasn't like a
trained operative, and so, you know, there was a lot
of luck by the seat of your pants kind of stuff.
So anyway, what else do I have to pick? I
(43:55):
think that's about all I've got, So I'm gonna go
ahead and wrap it up here. I really appreciate you
sitting through this episode, and until next time, next out,
mm hmm.
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