Business of Coding Interview
When I first got started in tech, Gary Vaynerchuck was one of the first people to take me under his wing.
At the 2008 SXSW conference, Gary introduced me to many of the finest people in tech that I still know today, one of them being Joe Stump.
At the time, Joe was the Lead Architect of Digg, which in 2008 was one of the largest sites on the web. I remember thinking Joe was larger than life. A day after meeting him, I attended the Considerations of Scalable Web Ventures panel that Joe was on -- a panel which included other Internet Incredibles like Cal Henderson, Garret Camp, and Matt Mullenweg.
Though I didn't code yet, I was completely blown away what those guys did. I was especially blow away by Joe's ability to talk about scaling Digg in a way that even I understood, without dumbing it down.
By the end of that SXSWi, I was a Joe Stump fanboy.
Fast forward two and a half years later and Jackie and I found ourselves hitching a ride with Joe back to San Francisco, after attending Gary's Tahoe Tech Talks (we had stayed in touch and hung out since 2008).
During that ride, I told Joe that I was going to learn how to code when I got back from our West Coast trip. We talked for most of the ride from Tahoe to San Francisco about coding, but I'm pretty sure Joe still didn't believe me that I'd actually learn. I knew Joe had heard it all before, and I'm fairly sure I had said it all before.
Nevertheless, a week later, after we got back from San Francisco and armed with the advice of one of the smartest people I knew in the business, I sat down and really learned.
Fast forward three years again and it was my honor to sit down with Joe last summer (before I made the hop to CEO of Picturelife) and talk to him about life as a business-guy-turned-backend-lead. Today, his company Quick Left has posted our interview on their site.
I'm embedding the podcast below, but head to the Quick Left blog to check out the whole thing (and other posts they've done in their The Business of Coding series).