Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Travis Tidwell

This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Travis Tidwell (Dallas, TX) who is CTO and co-founder of Form_IO! Chuck and Travis talk about his background, open source struggles, and more. Check it out!

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:49 – Chuck: Welcome! We had you on Episode 125. A lot has changed huh? The nice thing, though, about these changes is that we seem to be tackling different problems.

1:42 – Guest: They are stabilizing on the same on the same design patterns. I think that’s refreshing. Back in the day, everyone had their own way of doing it. It was difficult to find which one is the RIGHT one.

2:05 – Chuck: Yes, I agree. Gives us your background, please!

2:20 – Guest: I am still doing Form IO, and the co-founder and CTO of the company. My Angular Story is MY story on how the company evolved.

3:05 – Chuck: How did you get into programming?

3:09 – Guest: I am going to be 40-years old in May! I am getting up there. Everyone who I am talking to (in my age) it seems like we have the same story. We have this story of having that REALLY old computer. Parents bring home the IBM or the Commodore 64 and that really is my story. At the time, the only thing you could learn with it was to program – there weren’t any video games, etc. A book that I geeked-out about was: “DOS for Dummies.”

6:28 – Guest: After college, I got a job for working for a company that used C++ code. People ask: How the heck did you get into Web? My background, too, was tap dancing and in the arts. Most people don’t know that. I was giving these tap lessons to kids – and around that time YouTube was just for cat videos. At the time, I thought it would be great to teach these tap video lessons online. I found a CMS at the time that would help me with my teaching intent. Drupal took me into the frontend libraries. PHP is a backend language, and Drupal was based entirely on PHP. There was this huge paradigm-shift within my career. I really got into these tools not knowing that it would change my career.

My open source has taken me to tutorial videos. Eventually, a light bulb went off and I found a solution that needed to be solved within Angular.

12:21 – Guest. 

12:28 – Chuck: I love the side hustle description: I saw a need out there and we solved it!

12:40 – Guest: Side hustle is great to talk about. Open source is a bit of a struggle (at that time) it was really hard to maintain open source and providing for your family at the same time. Open source is hard b/c you work your butt off, but you aren’t getting paid for it. It’s really, really difficult. I’ve had ups-and-downs actually with open source. You have to get innovative with it. I am really big on and supportive of people who are monetizing off of open source.

14:58 – Chuck: Open source – for me – I got burned out in June. Sometimes you are putting in a lot of time and not seeing any benefit from it. You have all of these things and something changes, something is different – I can’t take another night not seeing my kids.

16:06 – Guest: You have this original motivation as an open source developer – and you build something rally cool. You share with the world, but a lot of people don’t realize the tail of it. Come to realize it worked well for you – but not for everyone!

It makes your stock price go out – contributing to open source – especially if you have a popular open source library. Most of the jobs I would apply to I would just give them my GitHub repertoire. People are figuring out ways they can support themselves and monetize. The ones that can figure that out don’t burnout.

19:44 – Chuck: Babel – Henry Zhu. (See his Patreon account.)

20:08 – Guest: How does he do it?

20:20 – Chuck: It’s mostly contributions.

20:35 – Guest: I see that you are on Patreon. I urge people to go there and help support those open source people. It’s such a great thing and it’s becoming a trend. That’s one thing that drew me away from Drupal b/c at the time it had this negative connotation of monetizing on your open source. The spirit of the open source is THAT. It gives support to open source folks in order to provide for their families.

22:00 – Chuck: I talk a lot with Eric through CodeFund. It’s important to know these options.

22:24 – Guest: That is my road of open source and in creating IO.

24:01 – Chuck: You are the CTO and not the CEO. How did you wind up and forming IO?

24:15 – Guest: There were a lot of pain points. It all started with the prototype.

30:00 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

30:05 – Guest: The Vanilla Core Renderer! It doesn’t care what framework it gets attached to. We are working on a new template engine. 

31:55 – Chuck: I wish I had more time to code.

31:58 – Guest.

33:08 – Chuck: How can people find you?

33:10 – Guest: GitHub! Training YouTube Videos! Twitter!

34:56 – Fresh Books!

END – CacheFly

Travis

Chuck