This episode is a My Angular Story with Kion Stephen. He joined the Adventures in Angular Slack, where he was asked to be on the show. Listen to learn more about Kion and his story!

Kion didn’t start programming in high school like most. In college, he studied to be an engineer. In his second semester, he took a programming course, which was his first introduction to programming. It was the only class that appealed to him. He left the degree and spent two to three years trying to figure out what to do next. During this time he taught high school chemistry and math. During this time he built his mom something in Access to help her organize her office. He also built the private school he was working for something to help track what classes students were taking. That really made him want to begin programming. He found a degree that focused on computer information systems after that.

Kion started his degree in 2004 and was still teaching while doing his degree. During his last year, he found a job at a help desk where he was working with training software. His boss saw that he had an aptitude for programming, so Kion was asked to help that department. He worked with a web application, which was his first taste in professional programming. Since then he has been mostly doing web stuff.

After his first job as a programmer, he ended up in another company working with insurance application. He was exploring options for external and was made to investigate Angular. He wanted to have something user-friendly, responsive, and interactive as a front end to that portal. In 2014 Angular had what he was looking for in a JavaScript framework. He built an initial prototype over a weekend, which convinced everyone at work to use it. The project was built in a little over six months. It was functional, quick, and everyone was impressed.

Once he got started with the project he started hearing about a new Angular project. Just as his project was released in 2014, it was announced. It made him pay attention in most of 2014 to what was going on in the Angular community in 2014. He wanted to be informed and know what to expect. In 2015 he would try new projects just for him to make sure he was able to use the new information that was being released. In 2016 he really became ready to start rewriting everything. He wasn’t averse to the idea of rewriting but wanted to be able to do it quickly. He began the process of migration in his spare time at first. He did not think it was a painful process; he found it somewhat simple once the setup was started. Moving the system was the hardest part; how to get the system setup.

Kion put in quite a few hours before he knew what he was going to do. He saw it as an investment because afterward, he had a new tool to use. The industry is always changing, and because of this, you have to learn how to learn.

His approach to keeping up on things is to read articles and have subscriptions to courses. He listens to Ruby Rogues, JavaScript Jabber, and Adventures in Angular. You can’t keep up with everything, you have to focus on one area and pick what you stay current on the most.

GitHub: https://github.com/snorkpete