Profile: Justin Bodeutsch, Olympia programmer

            Olympia, Wash. programmer Justin Bodeutsch has worked as a web professional for the past eight years since he graduated from college. But, he has never formally studied computers or programming. His degree from Multnomah Bible College is in Bible theology and speech communication.

            Bodeutsch said he probably got in the field at the end of an era when formal education was not as required to get a job as a programmer as it is now. He said he learned most of what he needs to know through on-the-job training and independent study.

            “I love just creating stuff and some of the newness of the internet. It’s like a frontier, figuring out how to use it. I studied communication in college, so from that standpoint it’s a new way to communicate,” he said.

            He has worked at Monk Development since 2006. Loosely based in San Diego, Monk mostly creates and manages websites for churches; the company’s “content management system” is its “main product,” he said.

            He acts as a system administrator, solving problems Monk’s clients bring to him, and “finding other problems before they are big problems – problems that maybe nobody has brought to you yet. You just always have to be diligent.”

            He said Monk did not have a system administrator before, “so I just started doing some of that work. I’ve never had an official titling ceremony.” He said his title changes “depending on the context.”

            “To some people, ‘system admin’ is a dirty word, or it’s a terrible job,” he said, “Dev ops guy is my official informal title. That’s what I call myself internally, but my business card says, ‘System Administrator.’”

            He said he has been transitioning from PHP developer to full-time system administrator, and should be done with the transition by the end of year. He said his goal is just to be an “all-star sys-admin.”

            He is at Monk for the “long haul,” he said, “That’s been my goal all along. I’ve felt like I wanted to retire there.”

            “You know, I want to be able to take a tool and use it for good,” he said, “Monk’s mission is totally in line with mine.”

            He said he did not have the same feeling about the company he worked for before Monk, Netbiz. He said Netbiz was basically about “tricking realtors into thinking they needed a website, and the main cash flow was reselling adwords to realtors.” He said Netbiz had that one thing that was relatively successful, but it tried new ideas almost on a weekly basis. He said it was good that the company was responsive to the dynamics of the internet, but he did not feel good about a lot of the ideas, and the ideas were not very successful.

            He said his job with Netbiz was doing mostly HTML ad CSS for the designers. He said he leveraged his experience making websites for himself and his friends in high school and college, when it was novel for anyone their age to have a web presence at all. He said he also used his experience and training as the assistant to Multnoma’s web developer in his senior year of college.

            While he was at Netbiz, he taught himself PHP and MYSQL, because he “didn’t want to be there forever.” He said, “I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible because my boss was insane, and it was a horrendous commute.”

            He said he used w3schools a lot to get the basics down. Then, he said, he tried some ideas for websites that “never really went anywhere,” but the experience helped him learn to make applications and to see where he “got stuck, what worked and what didn’t work.”

            He said that work put him in the position to take a job with Monk. He had a side job helping to maintain the website for Imago Dei, a Portland, Wash. church. Imago Dei hired Monk to provide a new website, and Bodeutsch helped with the transition, helping get the new central management system online.

            He said he started doing some HTML and CSS for Monk, but he also did some basic PHP and MYSQL work, learning PHP from his boss. He said he bought some books, and, “at first, I was still just googling when I got stuck.” He worked five years learning more PHP and MYSQL and “a few other things here and there, but not really using them much.”

            “It’s really amazing how hard it is to get things perfect.  It’s really easy to go to a website and see things you don’t like about it. It’s hard to make a website that works well and is easy to use,” he said.

            He said of his current job that he does not “like that it’s constant.” He said, “When you have thousands of users there’re always people trying to use the system in a new way, always new features rolling out, or new bugs. You can’t just say, ‘Okay let’s not have any new bugs this week. I don’t want to solve any new bugs this week.’”

            His advice to new programmers is, “Keep learning. Try new things, even things that don’t seem completely relevant to what you’re doing. But, just keep trying new things and learning from other people that are more experienced.”