Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of my Angular story. This week
we're talking to Andrew Evans. Andrew, do you want to say hello and
introduce yourself? Sure? My name is Andrew Evans. I am a software
developer. I'm actually going to be at Captech Ventures. I recently just left
Capital one and I'm happy to be here when I'm building a new product.
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G two I. Very cool Yeah, we had you on what about this
time last year? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, we talked
about deploying to Firebase with Circle CI. Yes. Yeah. So anyway,
this shows a little bit more about you as a programmer and a person and
your journey than it was about the technology on the other show. So as
we get started, I'm just kind of curious, how did you get into
programming in the first place. Yeah, okay, So I ended up kind
of on a long and winding road to get kind of where I am now.
I originally actually have a bachelor's degree in history. I wasn't really sure
like what I wanted to do when I got to college. I had always
kind of been interested in technology, honestly, but I hadn't really thought that
was going to be the route for me, and I had considered going into
law or even like teaching or something like that. I got to, i
guess my third year of college and realized that I didn't really want to do
all those things. But I needed a job. And so at the time,
Huntington Ingles new Pert News Shipbuilding or most people just call it newper New
ship Building and Newport News was hiring designers and they were doing basically like a
votech program, which was essentially a year of like you they put you through
these graphic design courses and then you work on the floor as a like a
draftsman, like you know, you're actually making the drawings or at that time
they were getting into product models and because they were using a lot more like
machinery and they were trying to streamline what had been a manual building process.
Anyway, it was a great experience and I did that while I finished my
bachelor's and I still did my history degree, and I was working full time
and in school full time, which you know, was not for the light
at heart, but I did it. And then probably like maybe six months
into that, or maybe like a year after all of that, I realized
I kind of wanted to go back and be for to do like engineering,
and I found out about the master's and computer science program at the college.
I went to Christopher Newport and through a couple of different like pre RECs and
a couple of things that I had to do ahead of time to be administered
and into the school, I was allowed to go ahead and take the do
the master's program. And I was still working full time, and I did
that, and this this whole process took about four and a half years,
and uh, I really just fell in love with programming. I was kind
of interested in, like I said, like technology all along, but this
was my first foray really into like true like programming and like like coding and
you know essentially like software development rather than just from like a hobbyist standpoint of
you know, like building machines and that kind of thing. And so,
you know, I finish the my masters and then like I transitioned over into
they had a software engineering group and I worked with them for about six years,
and I did just about everything, and I had a great time.
I learned a lot about like you know, connecting systems. I did a
lot of things that connected essentially legacy systems to systems that they would buy.
And so I had a lot of kind of experiences where I had to troubleshoot
things and I had to you know, they gave you, you know,
this thing in your lap and like, okay, make this work, and
so I had to do research and I got to work with like all kinds
of different people across the company, and it was a it was a lot
of fun and I basically kind of got to the end of that period,
and that's when I realized that I still wanted to stay in technology, and
I kind of and I had at that point become like a senior engineer,
and so that brought me to Capital One, and that's where I've been up
until recently, which is, like I said in the beginning, I'm getting
to transition over to Captec Ventures as a consultant. And since being at Capital
One, and then when we talked last time, which was I guess last
year, this time, you know, I've been able to do all kinds
of things, even beyond the work that I did when I worked for new
Pert Neuwership building, and I've been able to get into open source. I've
been able to get into cloud technologies, and you know, again it's just
it amazes me because you know, I'm going on just about I guess this
is my ninth year, tenth year in like technology, and I still love
it. You know. It's like one of those things where I think,
you know, pretty shortly in the in the process of getting up to speed
and learning, I just like it never stopped being interesting. And it's the
only thing that I think, like subject matter wise, has really been that
way for me because I've always been kind of somebody that I wouldn't really has
a short attention span, but I do get kind of bored. And technology
is so diverse and there's so much to learn that it always has something interesting,
you know, and it's and it's still exciting. And I will say
that, you know, you do have to after working in an industry for
a while, you do have to like do certain things to you know,
get yourself out of lulls. And it's it is sometimes easy to kind of
get into like patterns. But either way, that's you know, kind of
where I am. And now you know, as a result, I ended
up actually doing an MBA in the middle of that story. Also that I
didn't mention. And now, uh, you know, I work full time
as a software engineer, and I in my free time, I contribute to
open source projects. I do a fair amount of blogging, and I do
talks at meetups and a couple other local groups, and I just you know,
like I said, I love it. I have fun, and I
I try to help people, you know, whenever possible as well. Yeah,
it makes sense. I'm I'm kind of curious, you know, just
to back up a little bit, so it sounds like you had an interest
in tech, you got the designer job, and then you transitioned in to
programming. At what point did you really consider yourself a programmer? I would
say probably like my second year in the master's program, I was doing this
project for a like it was a software engineering course, and it was one
of those courses that's like a survey of software engineering and we went over you
know, like the traditional agile versus waterfall versus like scrum and extreme programming and
all that stuff, and we were also at the same time learning design patterns.
It was, and we had to do this project that was really really
intense. It was like a it's basically like a drawing project. And this
was back with Java swing. And if you've ever done Joba swing, you
know it can be a huge pain because you you have to define everything,
like you define the canvas, you define literally like where pixels are. You
know, it's just very it's very intense. And basically we had to design
this program that would allow you to draw shapes, and then we had to
implement I think a queue and then it was like you had to be able
to do undo and redo, so you had like almost kind of like time
travel, I guess, like you see in read us or a lot of
applications today. But like the whole thing was that, you know, I
think that whole project took me like about forty hours of work, and it
was the first time where I had actually built a full project and actually understood
everything, you know. It wasn't like one of these things where like I
you know, up until that point I had been kind of you know,
I was copying you pasting things, or people were kind of holding my hand.
And that was one of those projects where it just kind of, you
know, you hit that critical mass moment where you're like, wow, I
understand this, you know, and it's awesome, you know. And I
mean my code was probably terrible, Like I'm kind of ashamed of probably whatever
I wrote there, but that's it's common thing. Yeah, But like you
know, all to say, it was about the experience, you know,
and it was one of these things where like you you know, you stood
back and you were like I really get it, you know, and it
was just kind of like this cathartic moment where you've been working so hard to
try to understand so so so basically the other part. So I told you
the first program where like I, it was the drawing program. The next
one was the that I really felt like a programmer was my last year.
I had to implement a hard drive. It was basically like it's all in
memory, but I had to you know, they're give we were given a
stack trace. You have like a glob of memory, and then you have
some kind of program that would would just do reads and writs to it in
a predefined pattern. And the whole thing was that we would implement a cash
with it, and then you would have to do metrics on the cash so
you could show like how what kind of improvement performance wise you could get by
using the cash or not using it, that kind of stuff. The way
that the assignment was written was very like methodical enough that you could actually write
the program to run all at once and you just you know, you do
the logging as the things as the cash was being read. And so anyway,
it was a I had a really slow computer. I had like a
it was like an old laptop that because I didn't have a lot of money
you know back then, and so like I, it was slow. It
was a really big program. And so what I did was I just got
it. I set it up to log all the information as the program ran,
and I just let it run for about ten hours and I went out,
you know, I went out with my mom, I think I went
shopping or something. And I came back and I had all the metrics through
them into Excel, wrote up my report, and I was done. And
that was like one of the coolest things ever because I just realized that,
like, I let a whole job run on its own, and that was
one of those another one of those moments where I realized that, you know,
I knew what I was doing, you know, And it's just kind
of one of those things where I think we spend a lot of time,
especially in the software world, where we you know, try to do things,
but we're just kind of hanging on, like we you know, maybe
we only have no pieces of it, or we know that, you know,
this thing doesn't work, and it's just really it's really, you know,
amazing when you do a full you create a system and it works,
It works the way it's supposed to do, and it works well. Makes
sense. So how did you wind up getting into Angular? So about two
years ago, like shortly after I got to Capital One, the one of
the projects that I was on, they we had a front end developer and
then we had a couple of back end folks and I was actually hired on
as a job a developer or a back end person. And basically the front
end person left the company and we were kind of we were stuck, like
we needed somebody to take over the work. And you know, as I
told you, like, you know, I'm always a curious person, so
I was like, well, let's give it a shot. And so this
was an Angular JS so you know, what a whole lot to write home
about, but like it. It kind of brought me into the front end
community and I took over this stories and you know, I helped to bring
the project back up the speed and whatever. But it was a great learning
experience. And then it made me interested in Angular, like like Angular two
plus, and I started to at home. I started playing with Firebase,
which is kind of one of the reasons that I ended up writing the article
and doing the talk that I did with you last year. And so basically
I did a couple more contributions to that project, and then there was a
couple of projects after that that were actually Angular, and I really got to
get my hands dirty with all this stuff. And then the I started getting
into the open source projects because I started to see, like I started following
injury X, I started following like, you know, the Angular project,
and I started meeting all these people. And then the big thing that got
me into it was when I got to be part of the Angular and depth
of community and I was able to I got invited to be a guest author,
and then I ended up just being a regular contributor. And the the
friendships and the things that I've learned from working with the folks that contribute to
that blog, it's just it's just amazing. I mean it's still like I
follow it all the time, just and I learned, you know, something
new all the time with them. But that all really got me more into
the whole time. I'm you know, working on different Angular projects and the
and I got you know, a chance to learn about like lazy loading modules
or like service workers or stuff like that, and anyway, it just it
just kind of continued to grow and it's and it's been great because the Angular
community is really friendly. You know, there's a lot of support and you
know, if you have problems to you need to open a GitHub issue or
go to a forum or something. And then the the whole thing that I
enjoyed about it was that people. You know, one of the things that
I'm i guess more or less kind of proud of is that I've found that
people are actually reading my blog, like you know, like we're blogging.
Is so interesting because when you write a lot of times you think you're like,
well, nobody's going to read this, and then like you know,
people have like messaged me on like Twitter or Slack or whatever, and like
they're like telling me, you know, this is great. You know this
has really helped me. And and that's and like I said, you know
in the first part, helping people is one of the central tenants of all
of this, and I like how, you know, I'm able to help
people that way. And so it's all just kind of flowed together to make
me, you know, an angular fan, but bigger than that, just
a still a fan of software development. Early in my career, I figured
out which jobs were worth working at and which ones weren't. Mostly by trial
and error. I created a system that I used to find jobs and later
contracts as a freelancer. If you're looking for a job or trying to figure
out where you should go next, and check out my book, The Max
Cooder's Guide to Finding your Dream Developer Job. The book walks you through figuring
out what you want, vetting companies that meet your criteria, meeting that company's
employees, and getting them to recommend you for a job. Don't settle for
whoever has listed their job on the job board. Go out and proactively find
the job you'll love. Buy the book at devchat dot tv slash job book.
That's devchat dot tv slash job book. That makes sense. And yeah,
there's there's a lot to that, And you talked a little bit about
it about the technology, but it sounds like what mostly drew you in was
the community around Anguler. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah, it definitely has.
And it's also really just you know, amazed me because I've gotten predominantly into
JavaScript nowadays, and I remember, you know, back in twenty eleven,
twenty twelve, thinking like JavaScript was total crap. I was like I was
like, you know, it's clunky, it doesn't work. And now I'm
just like I'm amazed because it's you know, it's matured. There's so many
different frameworks that not only help you but enhance you know, a lot of
the features. And even since I've been able to work at Capitol One,
I've also done some back end with with JavaScript, Like I've gotten into some
express apps. You know, We've created a couple of different custom micro services
and it's all leveraging JavaScript. Very cool. So what are you working on
these days? Well, so, like I told you, I'm getting ready
to go through a you know, kind of a big change for moving back
to Richmond, and I'm starting a new job with Captive Ventures, but it'll
be in with their front end practice, so I'll continue kind of this Angular
journey. But you know, I'm I'm basically professionally, you know, like
as I said Angular, I've been working on some projects for Capital one that
I've been able to you know, finish up here this past week. But
at home or on the side, I guess you could say, I'm I
just did. I'm working on a contribution to dr X. They needed one
of just responded to one of the issues for like a doc tutorial on how
to add injury X to existing app. So I wrote, like a fairly
lengthy process for that and it created and app and whatever. But I'm also
working on the I've kind of gotten into chatbots here recently, so like I've
been using Twilio and having some fun with you know, baking, making some
basic express APIs that that I have a little chatbot that will call and help
me to do some basic tasks during the day, and then you know,
beyond that. Next week now I think it's two weeks away, I'm presenting
a talk on firebase and how to do several little SAPI as a firebase at
a meet up in Richmond. So I'm just have a few things on the
fire but and then you know, all of that has like associated posts and
talks and and whatever else, so never a never a dull moment. I
guess, yeah, it makes sense. Cool, Well, good luck on
the move, Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think I think we'll
be all right. We you know, it's it's really nice to move back
to somewhere that you're very familiar with versus you know, moving somewhere completely new.
I guess yeah, so yeah, but yeah, the next time,
next time you talk to me, I'll be a full time Richmond or again.
There you go. One thing that I'm always wondering is, you know,
you get into Angular, are there particular features because we talked about the
community already, are the particular features of the framework that that gets you excited?
Yeah, I would say that that Like I actually really kind of like
the whole separation of concerns. I like like the way that you know,
you know, I can appreciate like a small project being in one file,
but having just that that basic set of standards where you know every component is
going to have, you know, a template versus like you know, a
style sheet and the actual component back in more or less file. Those kind
of patterns are what really really make me appreciate Angular and what what I like
a lot because you know, one of the best parts of Angular is that
it scales very well. You know, it has like a very consistent model
that if you have like a team or a larger project, it's very easy
for developers to come on board because it follows the same kind of you know,
methodologies versus something like you know, Reactor or one of those other frameworks,
because they those are great, but they also give you a lot of
freedom, and it's hard sometimes when you have new developers that aren't familiar,
because then it takes them a while to onboard. And I would say that,
like, my favorite part of Anguler probably is really honestly just the continuity
of everything because even you know, in the way that you define services versus
components and that kind of thing, you know, it's all kind of the
same pattern. And so I would say, like, that's definitely a thing.
I'm also super excited about IVY. I've been having fun kind of playing
with a little bit here recently. And then you know, obviously performances is
a good any any performance boost is a good thing. Yeah, absolutely,
what do you Yeah, I was gonna say IVY and that stuff that's coming
up, or their other fetures of Angular nine, or you know other things
that you see coming in the Angular community that you're excited about. Yeah,
I think you know, I've read the the post on on the new features
of Angular nine that that came out, like when IVY was released, and
you know, they talked about the faster run times for tests, which is
always like a you know, a really good thing. I know that Karma
hasn't always been the most friendly tool to play with, so you know that
that's definitely something that I'm excited about and then I'm also you know, more
or less just kind of excited about the way that I think Angular. The
newest upgrades to Angular can really make the platform more expandable, Like there's a
there's room for contributions, and you know, they're really getting into more of
like a community model, which is really great because now it's not just like
a framework that Google created, it's like a framework that a community created.
Yeah, that makes sense, and and I love that aspect of things too,
especially because the community is really what makes Angular terrific. Yeah. Absolutely,
I mean there's a lot of that that has been cultivated by the folks
at Google, but they couldn't create it by themselves, and the community is
really top notch. Yeah, and that's a I mean, you know a
lot of people are always worried about frameworks that are coming from companies, but
that's I think that's one of the best parts is that they've really opened it
up, you know, to a greater community. So you feel like the
changes that they make in Angul aren't necessarily effective of what works for Google,
so much of what works for the community, which is like you know,
a really great future. Well if people wanted to kind of get a glimpse
into who you are. I mean, because we usually talk about code,
we talk about careers, but there's a lot more to folks than just what
makes you into the programmer that you are, the professional that you are.
So if people got to know you, what other kinds of things would they
find out about you? Oh? Sure? Yeah? So well, I'm
married, so my favorite thing is obviously faint how my wife. But beyond
that, I I like, I like building things, so I do.
I haven't done it in a while because we've just been so busy with a
couple of these job transition or the transition up here and back to Richmond and
all that. But I really like woodworking, and I felt like some of
the furniture we have, and I have a couple of plans for our new
place that I'm pretty excited about. But I, you know, I like
to build things. I also actually am a runner, and I enjoy kind
of the running community, and I'm excited to again get back into that in
Richmond. Richmond as a fairly vibrant group set of groups really that do like
run, you know, five k's and ten k's and beyond. But beyond
that you know, you can usually on a weekend you can find us if
and I like, you know, at a local restaurant or a movie or
you know, any type of you know, fun event that might be happening
in town. Uh. And you know, we always we really like to
travel, and so last year we were able to go to Yellowstone. This
year, We've got a couple of places on the horizon that I'm not sure
we're gonna be able to go to, but we're definitely in the works.
Very cool. And we have two cats. I have to give a plug
from my my fur babies. And the funniest part is I actually have applications
named named after all three and my my most popular open source project on GitHub
has the most h has the most s forks, and most stars. I
named it for my wife, So there you go. There you go.
Wow. Yeah, Also being one of the resources on the injeriks help docs,
you know, that kind of helps a little bit, but it's still
it's still because I named it after her, So there you go. Yep.
Cool. Well, if people want to connect with you online, where
do they do that? Well, you can definitely friend me on you know,
Twitter, or I mean follow me on Twitter, or you can look
me up on LinkedIn. I also, if you just go to Andrew Evans
dot b ev you can find pretty much everything else. And I usually have
links up there to the different places I blog and communicate and everything sounds good.
All right, well let's go ahead and do some pics. Sure,
Okay, So I think this is like something fun that we were interested in
what you're telling me, Okay, yeah, so definitely. I haven't gotten
to watch this yet, but I've heard amazing things that the Card Show.
Oh yeah on CVS. Yeah, everybody, everybody's telling me that that it's
it's awesome, So I definitely I would have to make that one of them.
You know. I guess I don't have to tell you then that it's
awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm getting as soon
as you know, I've set it up as soon as we move, you
know, that's first thing I'm gonna watch. But we also we're both my
wife and I are both big fans of the Expanse, so they're you know,
working on season five, I think, coming up. So that's kind
of exciting. Uh. And then I guess, you know, I probably
should have a lot more, but I can't think of anything on the tip
of my tongue right now. Yeah, it's funny because I was going to
pick the expanse I've been watching the fourth season? Is that the one that
came out? Yeah, did you read the books? I have read the
books, so yeah, see, so that's what that's what where I'm like,
I guess that that would be a pick on to itself too, Like
I've already I've bought one of them. I'm you know, I'm They're like,
I'm in the they're in the queue for me to read. But I've
heard everyone tell me that, like, you should read those if you really
like the show. So yeah, I've I've definitely I've listened to the books
on audible. Yeah, and so yeah, yeah those are those are definitely
definitely good. And then I was trying to think, oh, actually,
it's kind of like off the wall pick We just saw the second Jumanji movie
and that was hilarious. I would say that that you should definitely watch that
as well, especially if you like old man jokes. They're there because they
make because the it's the two Danny DeVito and and uh oh crap, I
can't remember his name is now but Danny Glover, they they're they're in the
Yeah, they they get sucked into the game and so but they get you
know, they become like the younger you know players. So there's all these
jokes about how their hips are working and that kind of stuff. Yeah,
it look pretty funny. I saw the last one where the teenagers get sucked
in. Yeah, they're they're still there, I think, I think all
they all come back to but the they swap, you know, like two
people are away when the whole game comes back online or whatever, so you
know, they they don't come until later. But but yeah, that was
that was fun and it was a it was a good family movie too nice.
All right, Well, let's see I was going to I was going
to pick the Expanse. So I don't know if I picked it on this
show or not. So I'll just throw out a couple of other ones.
I've been listening to a book on audible and it's by Patrick Rothfuss. It's
called the Name of the Wind. I'm actually reading the sequel to it,
or listening to it on audible. My brother told me to listen to it.
And it's funny because I started it like three times and I just couldn't
get into it and then I don't know what it was, but just I
finally got past kind of the initial deal and then it was like, oh
wow, this is this is terrific. So anyway, I really enjoyed that,
and uh yeah, so I'm going to pick those books. I'm also
working on the possibility of doing something around a podcasting course, so if you're
interested in that, go to devchat dot tv slash workshops and you can check
that out as well. Some folks are asking me, how do you know,
how do you do it? How do you put it together? And
that's something that I'm looking at, So yeah, we'll pull that together as
well. Yeah, that'd be awesome. I'll definitely check it out. Yeah
all right, Andrew, Well, thank you for coming and talking to me
for a half hour. Sure, yeah, no, anytime. I appreciate
you bringing back on the show. I am I Yeah, I'm a I'm
a fan. I definitely follow follow your You do a really awesome job with
your podcast. Oh thanks, I appreciate it. All right, we'll go
ahead and wrap this one up. It was super fun talking to you.
Yeah, I enjoyed it. Look look forward to maybe talking to you again
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