![]() So I moved to QA, I did QA for six months and then during that six months, the guy I was working with, he looked right at me and said, “You’re worth more than this, go get an offer, bring it back, they’ll probably match it and keep you.” So I went out, I got an offer, they didn’t match it and I went and took my first programming job! Well, by the time I got done at Mozy, I was like, “I want to be a programmer. Well, the company got acquired by EMC Corporation and there were some other political things going on, I decided I really didn’t want to manage all those people, I just wanted to write code - which was a total shock for me because in my computer science classes, I was like, “All right, so these guys get paid to write these toy programs and there’s no fulfillment in this for me, so I really don’t want to be a programmer.” We hired more Tech Support people and we didn’t have a QA department at the time, and so part of the things that I picked up was writing automated tests, where I could, for testing the product, so that it would go out with fewer bugs and thereby lighten our Tech Support load.īy the time I actually looked up and realized where things had gone, the guy that was senior to me in Tech Support had moved over to the sales department to help them with their technical needs, and I was running a 30-person department in this start-up, and I was like 25.Ĭharles: It was crazy, and a lot of the success was due to the fact that I was willing to just pick up the keyboard and write some code. ![]() Thom: You built a full-fledged Tech Support Ticketing Management System as your first Ruby project!Ĭharles: Right. So we started building the system to queue all of the emails and it kind of grew from there into a full-on Tech Support system. So, it was a little bit of both.Ĭharles: Since I had taken the programming classes and had a degree in a related field, programming wasn’t that big a deal for me. The company at that time was building its web resources in Ruby on Rails, so we wound up building it in Ruby on Rails, and any utilities that we had to build we’d just write server-side Ruby scripts. We were under pressure to keep up and Walt Mossberg was slightly unhappy that some of the Tech Support requests were taking longer than he would’ve liked to get answered, and so we decided that we would write a program that would basically queue our emails, so that we could just answer one, and it would immediately pull up another one. ![]() There was only two of us answering these emails and we just got totally slammed. ![]() So all of a sudden our support load went way up because we had a whole bunch of new people signing up for the service to get their computers backed up. I was answering customer emails about how to use Mozy ( Mozy at that time was Windows only) but I made the transition and after I’d been there for about four months, the product was featured in The Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg actually reviewed Mozy. So I got this job in Tech Support, it was a real easy transition, because I was pretty familiar with Windows and Linux and everything. I’d been working in Tech Support at Brigham Young University while I was going to school for four or five years. I was working Tech Support for a company called Mozy. Thom: So when and how did you discover Ruby? I would bet it is the story that everybody seems to tell: Rails brought you to Ruby.Ĭharles: Yes and no. I programmed on my TI calculator and I’ve been programming Ruby now for about seven-and-a-half years. I’ve been programming off and on since I was a kid. I have a degree from Brigham Young University in Computer Engineering, which is more hardware oriented than software. I actually started out doing Tech Support and moved from there into Ruby programming. I’ve worked for a handful of companies in Utah. “ So Chuck, tell us a little bit about yourself“.Ĭharles: All right, well, I was born and raised in Utah. Thom: You are the leader of the extremely popular Podcast, Ruby Rogues.įor now, pretend that this is a podcast and you are a guest. He describes a little about himself, his background and unlikely inspiration that led to The Ruby Rogues through TeachMeToCode. We begin with the Leader and Founder of ‘The Rogues’, Charles Max Wood. In this series of articles I will share the results of my interviews with the members of this special group. The podcast can be accessed on iTunes or on the website and offers a ‘fly on the wall’ view of a great bunch of technology savvy people sharing their ideas and opinions. They allow the rest of us to listen in on their discussion by way of the Ruby Rogues podcast. Every week a group of Ruby Enthusiasts get together in a Virtual Roundtable and explore/discuss/argue some aspect of the Ruby language or the Ruby community.
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