Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Fred Zirdung This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Fred Zirdung. Fred is currently the head of curriculum at Hack Reactor, where he essentially builds all of the tools and learning materials for the students there. He is also an instructor and has been there for five years. Prior to that, he worked for multiple companies such as Walmart Labs as well as many small startups. He first got into programming with the Logo programming language in the 6th grade and he had always been interested in working with computers since a young age. They talk about what got him into web programming, what enthralled him about JavaScript and Ruby on Rails, and what he is proud of contributing to the JavaScript community. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 76
• Fred intro
• How did you first get into programming?
• Coding professionally for 20+ years
• Coding prior to college graduation
• Logo programming language
• QNX operating system
• Were you always interested in programming?
• Always interested in computers
• Commodore 64
• Basic programming in high school
• Programming didn’t click for him until high school
• In college when the web became popular
• Computer engineering degree in college
• What was it that appealed to you about software over hardware?
• Software vs hardware
• Embedded systems software
• How did you get into web programming?
• Dolby Laboratories
• What technologies got you excited?
• JavaScript, Perl, and Ruby on Rails
• Loved the flexibility of JS and Rails
• Found something he could be productive with
• What are you proud of contributing to the JavaScript community?
• What are you working on now?
• And much, much more!

Links:

• JavaScript Jabber Episode 76
• Hack Reactor
• Walmart Labs
• Dolby Laboratories
• JavaScript
• Perl
• Ruby on Rails
• @fredzirdung
• Fred’s GitHub
• Fred’s Medium

Picks Charles