MJS 090: AJ O’Neal

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with A.J. O’Neal who is a panelist on My JavaScript Jabber usually, but today he is a guest! The guys talk about AJ’s background and past/current projects. Today’s topics include: JavaScript, Ruby, jQuery, Rails, Node, Python, and more.

Hosted by: Charles Max Wood
Special Guests: AJ ONeal
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Show Notes

This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with A.J. O’Neal who is a panelist on My JavaScript Jabber usually, but today he is a guest! The guys talk about AJ’s background and past/current projects. Today’s topics include: JavaScript, Ruby, jQuery, Rails, Node, Python, and more.
In particular, we dive pretty deep on:
1:23 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please.
1:27 – AJ: I brief introduction: I am a quirky guy who is ADD and I love to figure out why/how things work. I like self-hosting or owning things in technology.
2:00 – Chuck: Where do you work now?
2:02 – AJ: I work in UTAH at Big Squid!
3:29 – AJ: I have my own company, too!
3:41 – Chuck: Yeah we’ve talked about that before. Where can we go?
3:54: AJ: We have 2 products that are both Node. Greenlock for Node.js is one of them! The other one is Telebit.
5:44 – Chuck: This interview is all about your background. How did you get into programming?
6:04 – AJ: I was in middle school but before that my grandmother was a secretary at the Pentagon. She worked on getting people paid and she wrote a program to assist these paychecks to be printed with fewer errors. Because of that she had a computer at home. I remember playing games on her computer.
The guest talks about his background in more detail.
15:21 – Chuck: No it’s interesting! I’ve done a couple hundred interviews and they all say either: I went to school for it OR I did it for my free time. It’s interesting to see the similarities!
16:00 – AJ: Yep that’s pretty much how I got into it! I went on a church service mission to Albania and really didn’t do any computer work during those 2 years.
19:39 – Chuck: You went to BYU and your mission trip. A lot of that stuff I can relate to and identify with b/c I went to BYU and went on missions trip, too! And then you got into Ruby and that’s how we met was through Ruby!
20:25 – AJ: Yep that’s it. Then that’s when I learned about Node, too. There was a guy with a funny hate – do you remember that? (No.)
21:03 – Chuck: Maybe?
21:07 – AJ continues.
27:53 – Chuck: What made you make the transition? People come into and out of different technologies all the time.
28:18 – AJ: Yeah it started with me with jQuery!
Rails has layers upon layers upon layers.
AJ talks about different technologies their similarities/differences and mentions: JavaScript, Rails, Python, Node, Ruby, and much more.
31:05 – Chuck: Node went out of their way on certain platforms that Rails didn’t prioritize.
31:11 – AJ continues to talk about different technologies and platforms.
33:00 – Chuck: You get into Node and then at what point does this idea of a home-server and Node and everything start to come together? How much of this do you want to talk bout? At one point did they start to gel?
33:33 – AJ: It’s been a very long process and started back in high school. It started with me trying to think: How do I get this picture on my phone to my mom? I thought of uploading it to Flickr or could I do this or that? What about sending it to someone in China?
39:57 – Chuck.
40:01 – AJ continues and talks about libraries and certificate standards.
42:00 – AJ continues with the topic: certificates.
42:44 – Chuck: I am going to go to PICKS! Where can people find you?
42:55 – AJ: Twitter! Blog! GitHub! Anywhere!
43:55 – Chuck: Picks!
END – Cache Fly
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MJS 090: AJ O’Neal
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