​Episode Summary

In this episode of My JavaScript Story, Charles Max Wood hosts Ben Lesh, RxJS Lead and senior software engineer at Google.

Ben studied to be an illustrator in Columbus College of Art & Design, but upon graduation he realized he wanted to work in web development. Ben thinks having an interest in problem solving was a key factor on his journey in becoming a developer.

For his first programming job, he applied to a position and when he didn’t hear back he kept calling them until they gave him an opportunity. He then worked as a consultant at several other positions before he was offered a job at Netflix where he became the development lead for RxJS 5. Ben then switched over to Google’s Angular team. He is currently working on Angular Ivy at Google.

Ben then talks about the projects he has worked on that he is proud of. In his journey as a developer, Ben believes that the take-away lesson is asking lots of questions. He himself had no formal programming training and he got to where he is today by asking sometimes embarrassingly simple questions.

Ben Lesh:

Charles Max Wood: