CJ Avilla

The First Pancake: Hello World

Show Notes


  • Why a podcast? 
    • Fun to hang out
    • We learn a lot from one another.
    • Chance to share what we’re building and learning in public
    • Chance to meet and elevate other folks in the community
  • Set the stage for what to expect on the show 
    • We are figuring this out, so don’t hold us to it in these first few episodes ;)
    • Building and learning from Software Development but also life
  • Introduction and background - Our Origin Stories 
    • First web dev moments
    • CJ
      • TI89 games (2003)
      • MySpace (2004?)
      • Perl for seismology lab (2005)
      • free 000webhost style domain with ads (2005)
      • PHP pamphlet sites for air conditioning company
      • UNR Student union ASP.NET
      • Contract work building one-off apps - campaign management app that later rebuilt in Rails
      • Joined the military, deployed in 2011 to Afghanistan, and learned a ton of Cisco networking and security
      • Learned c++ in CS, but also did a lot of IS classes and started IS focused MBA after graduating
      • VB.NET at a finance company focused on insider trading
      • .NET c# for robots - wasn’t a fan of the company
      • “become a hacker” - App Academy fell in love with ruby
      • Small vacation rental startup where I learned - Django and python
      • Stripe
    • Colin
      • Library books on “VRML”, making games, “hacking” games locally to do different things https://store.steampowered.com/app/32380/STAR_WARS_Jedi_Knight_Dark_Forces_II/
      • Homestead, Geocities, Myspace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_GeoCities, https://myspace.com/
      • Photoshop Communities & Kirupa Forum - Layer Tennis
      • Writing code in Notepad, no syntax highlighting, no project folder
      • College - Started with Computer Sci but decided to take another path
      • College Newspaper - College Publisher 
        • Rails CMS for the newspaper
        • Realizing that I would graduate, I moved us to WordPress
      • Agency → Laid off in recession → Starting my own agency 
        • WordPress
        • APIs
        • Salesforce
      • Building tech community 
        • Reno Collective Coworking
        • Ignite Reno
        • hackathons, meetups
      • A few startups 
        • Founder, first-employee
      • More consulting
      • Now at Orbit - https://orbit.love/
    • Links
    • https://twitter.com/colinloretz
    • https://twitter.com/cjav_dev
    • https://github.com/cjavdev/vim-curriculum