Panel: Charles Max Wood

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!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

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.

The guest talks about BASIC.

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.

The guest goes into-detail about his background!

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

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Charles Max Wood

Gareth McCumskey