Joe Leo joins Charles Max Wood on this week's My Ruby Story. Joe is the Founder and CEO of the agile software consultancy, Def Method. He shares his journey as a developer. Joe was tutored by his uncle and learned how to code in Basic on a command line. He wanted to be in the music industry and liked math.

He then attended New York University in the evenings to get a Cinema degree and worked as an administrative assistant during the day where he started programming. He really enjoyed development so he decided to seek full time employment in software.

He started taking classes in JavaScript but was asked to code in Ruby for a client assignment. He then taught himself Ruby and then Rails and fell in love with it.

Joe is currently working on holistic product development and is delving into areas such as what makes a good product manager and what makes a good product design. Charles and Joe talk about difficulties in quantifying good product management skills or writing tests and other non-coding aspects that surround making a product.

Host: Charles Max Wood

Joined by Special Guest: Joe Leo

Sponsors

• Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan
• React Native Radio
• My Angular Story
• CacheFly

Links

• RR 423: The Well-Grounded Rubyist with David A. Black & Joseph Leo III
• The Well-Grounded Rubyist: Covers Ruby 1.9.1 by David A. Black and by III Joseph Leo (Author)
• Joe's LinkedIn
• Def Method
• What Really Makes a 10x Engineer?

Picks

Joe Leo

• https://www.kobee.io/
• ACR 2019 Ruby·Rails·React Conference

Charles Max Wood

• Sign Up on Devchat.tv for our weekly episode round-up
• How to Stay Current in Technology Effectively in 2019
• All In by by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton
• For Men Only by Shaunti Feldhahn, Jeff Feldhahn

FAQ

How did you get introduced to Ruby?

While taking classes in JavaScript, I was asked to code in Ruby for a customer we were working with. Coming from a Java background at first it was a little difficult but the more i learned about it, the more i fell in love with it.

What is the name of the Ruby book you co-authored?

The Well-Grounded Rubyist: Covers Ruby 1.9.1 by David A. Black and by III Joseph Leo

What do you recommend to developers that are just starting out?

Write code in your spare time. One way to learn if you will be a good developer is to not be able to get enough of coding. After spending the whole day coding, if you are still willing to learn new things and spend your free time coding, then a developer career is right for you.

What are the three pillars of application development?

Deleopment, project management and product management.