Guest: Steve Edwards

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Steve Edwards who is a website developer and lives in Portland, OR. He is a senior developer at an international corporation called, Fluke. Today’s main topic of conversation is Drupal. Check out the episode to hear about this and much more! 

1:05 – Chuck: Welcome! I appreciate your contributions with hooking me up with some people.

2:22 – Started in IT in 1995.

2:38 – Chuck: How did you get into software development?

2:46 – Steve: In high school not much courses on it. Then in college did some programming there. After college, I was supposed to get married. I was thinking finance. Never nailed down what I wanted to do. Called Bank of America in 1991 – called them. He said let me put in touch with someone. One of the things I got to put classes on “how does this system work.” I got into the banking job and realized not for me. Did realize that I do like teaching. Got software support for another bank. My banking software experience got me the job. We did interfaces – data from PC base to main systems like IBM, etc. I dealt with the source. Same time, I was a diehard racket ball player; on the board state organization. Someone organizing a website for group through Front Page. Hey do you want to take this over? Got to know Front Page. It’s painful to think about it. Same time a position opened up. I got PHP books, and created a new website for our racket ball organization. Off-time learning this. At work I used other tools for the job. That’s where I got into programming and developing. I was an analyst and wanted to program. I created a website from nothing in 2004 for a mountain bike shop. Learned a lot about PHB – and learned that I never want to build anything from scratch ever again. 2006 I start looing for a CMS and I got into some evaluations and got into Drupal. Now I got to do fulltime Drupal. Some guys left the company and got to do Drupal, also. There’s a book on basic JavaScript, and haven’t gotten into it. It’s nice because since 2009 I have been working from home. 3-4 years ago I heard about Angular and how it was used in Drupal. Weather.com – they did things with Angular. I started diving into Angular. Then a small project – worked with Travis then we started with our new ideas/projects. Then I went and took some Angular classes, and I was working on my project. I had these questions. They said that this was used for a one-time use. Okay, I had to figure it out. Travis one day asked: What are you doing? I showed him with the calendar and integrated with... Travis asked if I wanted to go to work with him. Then the past few years I have been working with Vue.js.

12:41 – Chuck: In 2006 I got into Ruby on Rails. I got into jQuery and did some backbone and progressed the same way you did. Worked with Angular and Vue. There is a lot going on there. Interesting to see how this has all progressed. At what point did you decide – JavaScript is the focus to some of these projects?

13:42 – Steve: Lightweight functions.

15:25 – Advertisement – Coder Job

16:05 – Chuck: What are you proud of with the work you’ve done?

16:20 – Steve: Article - All the different projects that it looks like for a developer – I have 5 or 6 projects that I want to get to that I haven’t had time to get to.

Steve talks about one of the projects he is working on.

17:55 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

17:59 – Steve: My company, Fluke, we have a cool setup. It has a three-legged system. In that we have all the background data, another for digital assets, and...

Steve: It’s so fast – I am trying to enhance it to make it even faster.

Another thing that I am working on is that we have a scheduling website for the fire department I am apart of. Band-Aids and glue hold it together. I am trying to work with a calendar so it can integrate – take over the data of a cell and put y stuff in there.  It would be efficient so I don’t get all these errors with this old system. It would give me grand control.

20:16 – Steve: I want to get more and more into JavaScript. The one thing that I like about my story is that you did in your spare time. That’s how I got into Google. Multiple years working up late, working with people and different modules. I got good enough (in 2009) and got good enough – it got me into the door.

21:13 – Chuck talks about his course on how to get a job.

Chuck: All you have to do to level-up is to put into the time. Working on open-source project

21:56 – Steve: Learning – find a project you want to do. What is something you want to tackle? What and how can you get it done with your tools? Stack overflow, or Slack questions. We started a new Meetup (last meeting was last month) and people do Vue on a regular basis. Slack room. That’s how I got into...

Personal experience you can help people and find

23:00 – Chuck: People want to level-up for different reasons. Whether you are trying to get better, or learn new things – getting to know people and having these conversations will shape your thinking.

23:33 – Steve: Also, networking.

24:10 – Chuck: I wasn’t happy where I was at and talked to people. Hey – what else is out there?

24:37 – Chuck: Any recommendations?

24:42 – Steve: The amount of courses that are out there, and it can be overwhelming. Find courses when they go on sale. I found some courses that were only $10.00. There is stuff that is free and things that you can pay for. It can be inexpensive.

26:38 – Chuck: I do the same thing. I wait for things to go on sale first. I’ve done that with courses. However you learn it. Some people work through a book and for others that’s not the way. Sometimes I will start with a video course then I get frustrated. It helps, though. There are different ways to do it. Go do it.

27:39 – Steve: There is a lot of good jobs – get your foot in the door as a junior guy. Getting the real-life experience.

28:15 – Chuck: How do people get ahold of you?

28:18 – Steve: Twitter, GitHub, wherever...

28:48 – Picks!

28:53 – Advertisement for Digital Ocean