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Episode 30 – John James Jacoby, the Master of Alliteration
For episode 30 we spoke with JJJ, a man that needs little introduction. During the episode we hear about his personal history in the early days of software development and his desire to work on the software that “brings people together for a purpose”.
This episode was sponsored by WP Ninjas, the creators of Ninja Demo and the highly popular Ninja Forms plugin.
Show Notes:
JJJ.me
JJJ’s post on distributed teams
Flox.io
Crowdfunding campaign for 6-months of bb work
Review us on iTunes
Transcript
INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.
BRAD: Welcome to Episode 30. Today, we have a special guest with us. We have John James Jacoby, and we’re going to be talking to him about working remotely, his Flox project, and about his crowd funding campaign that he has on the go. But first, Pippin, what about those sponsors?
PIPPIN: This episode is once again sponsored by the WP Ninjas, who have been kind enough to sponsor quite a few episodes, as we’ve been going. They are the developers behind the popular plugin Ninja Forms, as well as Ninja Demo and a couple of other plugins. Go check them out. They’re doing some pretty awesome work.
BRAD: Cool.
PIPPIN: John, why don’t we jump in and talk to you a bit.
BRAD: Welcome to the show, John.
PIPPIN: Yeah! It’s awesome to have you.
JOHN: Thank you. It’s super awesome to hang out with you guys again. Very cool.
BRAD: Yeah.
PIPPIN: Well, why don’t you first tell us just a little bit about yourself and maybe start by – when did you first get into coding, and then how did you get into WordPress from there?
JOHN: That’s a good question. My intro into coding was, gosh, I was probably — this was probably 1995.
BRAD: What?!
JOHN: Yeah.
BRAD: What that Atari or something?
JOHN: I would have been 16, maybe. I don’t know. It’s fuzzy now, right? It would have been on an old — my dad bought me. I convinced him. I persuaded him to buy me a Packard Bell, right? It was like I had a friend that was into software and kind of learning just a little Visual Basic programs, little things to do whatever, and he had a Visual Basic book. He was building little, stupid stuff, and I was like, wow, this is incredible. Like, you can just do this. That’s neat. I think he had a Packard Bell, and I was, like, well, clearly this is the machine I need to have.
[Laughter]
JOHN: And so my dad went to Sears, right, and maxed out a credit card on a Pentium 100 megahertz machine, 8 megs of ram, and that was it, right? I was off building Visual Basic, Microsoft Access database, sort of figuring out how software was made. Eventually, it was neat because I had someone that was learning at the same time as I was that was, you know, maybe a year or so ahead of me, so had an accidental mentor, someone that already had sort of made some mistakes and had learned sort of just some of the simple concepts that you have to learn the hard way, like arrays and globals.
BRAD: Yeah.
JOHN: And defining your variables and things, right?
BRAD: The Internet probably wasn’t a great resource back then for that either.
JOHN: No. Right, it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. It was, you’d go and buy a book or you had a book, a big 500, 700 page book, and you would just write the Hello World app and go and go and go. Eventually, what he ended up figuring out how to do, one way or another, was just de-compiling other Visual Basic programs and figuring out how they worked. And so we both would sit back-to-back and just spend hours re-factoring and figuring out how all this de-compiled, crappy code worked. It was sort of an interesting exercise in learning how to code because it was literally translating a bunch of gibberish into functioning code that made sense, so it was reverse engineering.
BRAD: What
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By Apply FiltersFor episode 30 we spoke with JJJ, a man that needs little introduction. During the episode we hear about his personal history in the early days of software development and his desire to work on the software that “brings people together for a purpose”.
This episode was sponsored by WP Ninjas, the creators of Ninja Demo and the highly popular Ninja Forms plugin.
Show Notes:
JJJ.me
JJJ’s post on distributed teams
Flox.io
Crowdfunding campaign for 6-months of bb work
Review us on iTunes
Transcript
INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.
BRAD: Welcome to Episode 30. Today, we have a special guest with us. We have John James Jacoby, and we’re going to be talking to him about working remotely, his Flox project, and about his crowd funding campaign that he has on the go. But first, Pippin, what about those sponsors?
PIPPIN: This episode is once again sponsored by the WP Ninjas, who have been kind enough to sponsor quite a few episodes, as we’ve been going. They are the developers behind the popular plugin Ninja Forms, as well as Ninja Demo and a couple of other plugins. Go check them out. They’re doing some pretty awesome work.
BRAD: Cool.
PIPPIN: John, why don’t we jump in and talk to you a bit.
BRAD: Welcome to the show, John.
PIPPIN: Yeah! It’s awesome to have you.
JOHN: Thank you. It’s super awesome to hang out with you guys again. Very cool.
BRAD: Yeah.
PIPPIN: Well, why don’t you first tell us just a little bit about yourself and maybe start by – when did you first get into coding, and then how did you get into WordPress from there?
JOHN: That’s a good question. My intro into coding was, gosh, I was probably — this was probably 1995.
BRAD: What?!
JOHN: Yeah.
BRAD: What that Atari or something?
JOHN: I would have been 16, maybe. I don’t know. It’s fuzzy now, right? It would have been on an old — my dad bought me. I convinced him. I persuaded him to buy me a Packard Bell, right? It was like I had a friend that was into software and kind of learning just a little Visual Basic programs, little things to do whatever, and he had a Visual Basic book. He was building little, stupid stuff, and I was like, wow, this is incredible. Like, you can just do this. That’s neat. I think he had a Packard Bell, and I was, like, well, clearly this is the machine I need to have.
[Laughter]
JOHN: And so my dad went to Sears, right, and maxed out a credit card on a Pentium 100 megahertz machine, 8 megs of ram, and that was it, right? I was off building Visual Basic, Microsoft Access database, sort of figuring out how software was made. Eventually, it was neat because I had someone that was learning at the same time as I was that was, you know, maybe a year or so ahead of me, so had an accidental mentor, someone that already had sort of made some mistakes and had learned sort of just some of the simple concepts that you have to learn the hard way, like arrays and globals.
BRAD: Yeah.
JOHN: And defining your variables and things, right?
BRAD: The Internet probably wasn’t a great resource back then for that either.
JOHN: No. Right, it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. It was, you’d go and buy a book or you had a book, a big 500, 700 page book, and you would just write the Hello World app and go and go and go. Eventually, what he ended up figuring out how to do, one way or another, was just de-compiling other Visual Basic programs and figuring out how they worked. And so we both would sit back-to-back and just spend hours re-factoring and figuring out how all this de-compiled, crappy code worked. It was sort of an interesting exercise in learning how to code because it was literally translating a bunch of gibberish into functioning code that made sense, so it was reverse engineering.
BRAD: What