Host: Charles Max Wood

Special Guest: Justin Searls

In this episode of My Ruby Story, Charles hosts Justin Searls, co-founder of Test Double, a software agency which helps developers improve their quality of the software.

Listen to Justin on the podcast JavaScript Jabber on this episode and this episode.

Justin got into programming playing with his Casio Calculator when he was 10 years old. He came up with little games such as guessing the number. Later on, he added features and soon created an ephemeral checkers game. He had no knowledge about the basics of programming and everything was self-directive.

Justin majored in Computer Science in college.However, he soon learned that Computer Science does not equal Application Development. The things taught to him by his professors were not very practical for building applications.

He had his first hands-on experience in programming when he worked at the campus library. He was asked to work on their flash base citation generator which was meant to help those who were doing research for their bibliography. Millions of people used it and its feedback led him to build web applications that could provide a free useful service to other people.

Over time, he found out that JavaScript was a good way to solve problems for people. However, he did not have a lot of autonomy over the jobs. He recalls an experience where every single Java library he wanted to pull off had to get approved by a committee.

He ended up building an earlier Ajax application which uses JavaScript for services. That was a path for him to record productivity.

To hear the rest of My Ruby Story Justin Searls, download and listen to the entire episode.

Justin Searls:

Charles Max Wood: