Guest: Gareth McCumskey

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with Gareth McCumskey who is a senior web developer for RunwaySale! They talk about Gareth’s background, current projects and his family. Check out today’s episode to hear all about it and much more!

0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job!

0:53 – Chuck: Hey everyone! Welcome! We are talking today with Gareth McCumseky!

1:05 – Gareth: Hi!

1:22 – Chuck: Are you from Cape Town, Africa? (Guest: Yes!)

1:35 – Gareth and Chuck talk about his name, Gareth, and why it’s popular. 

1:49 – Chuck: I am in my late 40’s. You were here for JSJ’s Episode 291! It’s still a hot topic and probably should revisit that topic.

2:20 – Guest: Yes!

2:30 – Chuck: It’s interesting. We had a long talk about it and people should go listen to it!

2:45 – Guest: I am a backend developer for the most part.

3:03 – Chuck: Yeah I started off as an ops guy. It probably hurt me.

3:21 – Guest: Yeah, if you poke it a certain way.

3:29 – Chuck: Let’s talk about YOU! How did you get into programming?

3:39 – Guest: South Africa is a different culture to grow-up in vs. U.S. and other places. I remember the computer that my father had back in the day. He led me drive his car about 1km away and I was about 11 years old. We would take home the computer from his office – played around with it during the weekend – and put it back into his office Monday morning. This was way before the Internet. I was fiddling with it for sure.

6:20 – Chuck: How did you transfer from building BASIC apps to JavaScript apps?

6:30 – Guest: Yeah that’s a good story. When I was 19 years old...I went to college and studied geology and tried to run an IT business on the side. I started to build things for HTML and CSS and build things for the Web.

9:26 – Chuck: Yeah, jQuery was so awesome!

9:34 – Guest: Yeah today I am working on an app that uses jQuery! You get used to it, and it’s pretty powerful (jQuery) for what it is/what it does! It has neat tricks.

10:11 – Chuck: I’ve started a site with it b/c it was easy.

10:19 – Guest: Sometimes you don’t need the full out thing. Maybe you just need to load a page here and there, and that’s it.

10:39 – Chuck: It’s a different world – definitely!

10:48 – Guest: Yeah in 2015/2016 is when I picked up JavaScript again. It was b/c around that time we were expecting our first child and that’s where we wanted to be to raise her.

Guest: We use webpack.js now. It opened my eyes to see how powerful JavaScript is!

12:10 – Chuck talks about Node.js.

12:21 – Guest: Even today, I got into AWS Cognito!

13:45 – Chuck: You say that your problems are unique – and from the business end I want something that I can resolve quickly. Your solution sounds good. I don’t like messing around with the headaches from Node and others.

14:22 – Guest: Yeah that’s the biggest selling point that I’ve had.

15:47 – Chuck: How did you get into serverless?

15:49 – Guest: Funny experience. I am not the expert and I only write the backend stuff.

Guest: At the time, we wanted to improve the reliability of the machine and the site itself. He said to try serverless.com. At the time I wasn’t impressed but then when he suggested it – I took the recommendation more seriously. My company that I work for now...

17:39 – Chuck: What else are you working on?

17:45 – Guest: Some local projects – dining service that refunds you. You pay for a subscription, but find a cheaper way to spend money when you are eating out. It’s called: GOING OUT.

Guest: My 3-year-old daughter and my wife is expecting our second child.

18:56 – Chuck and Gareth talk about family and their children. 

22:17 – Chuck: Picks!

22:29 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial!

END – Cache Fly

Charles Max Wood

Gareth McCumskey