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.”

Profile: Rand Riness

Computer information science Professor Rand Riness never particularly wanted to go into a technological field in and of itself. He got into computers and database management out of necessity early in his career as a public administrator in transit systems. Now, he teaches programming at South Puget Sound Community College.

Riness said computers have been a normal part of his life since his father owned one in the ‘60s. But, Riness said, “I’m not a professional programmer. I’m a problem solver, and computers are the tools to solve some of the problems.”

Riness earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Master in Public Administration, both from the University of Washington (UW). Shortly after graduating, he went to work as a transit planner.

“Transit is one of those services that is necessary for the people and can help do some things for people in the community,” Riness said, “All of my career has basically been driven by ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’”

Riness said he started using a personal computer for work when he worked as a transit planning consultant for Dave Consulting 1983-1985. Before that, the firm had a shared system called a super micro, he said. This was where he got into spreadsheet modeling and budget forecasting, he said.
Riness said that at UW he had some computing projects dealing with statistics and forecasting, but they used punch cards in the school’s main frame. When he worked at Intercity Transit in Thurston County, Wash. as the planning and development director (1988-1996), they “didn’t have much access to anything computing-wise” at first to do much analysis. It was all paper-based, he said. He said he was glad to get away from the paper, because it just could not handle the data.

Riness also held a position as a senior planner of the Thurston Regional Planning Council 1985-1988, doing mostly transit planning.

“I grew up riding the bus, and you never would have thought I’d end up working with buses, but it was good fit. And, at the time, IT was growing a lot, so I got a chance to do a lot of things and got to hire some good people.”

When it comes to policy and program analysis, Riness said, you start asking, “How do you measure stuff? What’s working? What’s not working? And, you need data to do that, a lot of data.” That leads to using computers to figure out how to collect, store and process data, he said.

Riness said he tells his classes the same thing, and he teaches people to think first about the data they are dealing with and why they are dealing with it. He said you need to “start with the end in mind” a la Stephen Covey, author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”

He often takes the time to talk with students about the kinds of conversations they might have with clients and employers to clarify the business needs of a project. Once you have grounded your understanding of the problem in the real world, he said, you can think about coding.

Riness started teaching part time at the college in 1998. He started teaching an Access class first, and the department asked him to teach other classes after the first quarter. He started teaching full time after the first year. Also, in 1997, he was a staff person for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges creating budget projections and allocations.

Riness said he took the teaching job because he liked the hours better than the hours he had to put in as a public manager. He said that, often as a manager, he would have his first meeting at 7 a.m., and he would not be finished until 1 a.m. Plus, Riness said, “I like change. Every quarter represents something different topic-wise, and different students.”

“The one thing that changes too much is probably the software, and keeping up to date is probably the biggest challenge,” Riness said.

Riness currently teaches four classes at the college: CIS 145 “Introduction to Access,” CIS 166 “Programming Business Objects (C#),” CIS 182 “Structured Query Language (SQL)” and CIS 266 “Developing Database Applications (ADO.NET with C#).” He taught a management class for five years before it got cut. He said, “I didn’t miss it.”

“I’ve been here longer than I’ve been any place else, but I don’t see myself going back to an eight-to-five job. As long as I can keep up with the software changes and the things I have to teach…I don’t see any reason to leave” the college, Riness said.

Riness said he attends South Sound .NET User Group meetings every couple of weeks to stay connected and up to date. He has been involved in the group since 2004, he said.

Every year or two for the last five or six years, Riness has helped organize and promote an event at the college for the Olympia Area SQL Server User Group. Open to the public, the events are to improve skills and focus on particular types of problems and solutions, he said. Each event has featured a number of guest lecturers, such as the experts in SQL Azure and business organization at the event last fall. The organizers have not set a date for the next event, but Riness said he expects it to be next spring or the following fall.

About programming in general Riness said, “We make a lot of this stuff more mysterious and convoluted than we need to.” He said, “I came in with a pretty good set of logic and critical thinking skills, but computers were foreign. All you’re doing is describing stuff.”

Profile: Scott Hamilton, Olympia programmer

                Olympia-area programmer Scott Hamilton has programmed both as a career and as a hobby for the last 15 years.

                Hamilton, 34, started working for Imagesource in Olympia, WA when he was 19 and has been with them ever since, helping provide the company’s paperless office service.

                Hamilton said he likes working on theoretical projects playing with languages for his personal projects.

                “I love programming, so it’s a hobby, and it’s a job,” Hamilton said.

                As a youth, he wanted to become a professional baseball player, golfer, or programmer, Hamilton said. He wanted to make games, because he liked programming the music and graphics for games.

                His first “real job” as a computer tech was upgrading Windows 95 for The Cheese Plate, and serving cheese, but it was not long before he moved on to Imagesource.

                At the time, in 1998, he was pursuing a technical degree at South Puget Sound Community College. One of his classmates was the owner of Imagesource. Hamilton said the owner was so impressed with Hamilton, who was tutoring others, that he hired Hamilton.

                Hamilton started working a state contract with the company putting a Visual Basic interface on a database, using an in-house framework. After that project, he decided to stick with the company. He has been working in the company’s paperless office service ever since.

                The company provides a paperless office service that involves scanning paper documents to digitize them, creating electronic forms to avoid paper in the first place, and putting together the workflow system. The role he now plays mostly involves customer interactions, mapping their business requirements to pass along to others on the team.

                Hamilton said that because of this role, he does not get to do a lot of programming at work anymore. “The programming is a treat, because that’s what I like to do,” he said.

                Hamilton said he enjoys designing languages and studying algorithms and has been able to apply cryptography at work.  He said he does not enjoy doing web presentation, but does enjoy the back end, like parsing and compiling text.

                In a recent personal project, Hamilton collaborated to create a video game in which the player pilots a space ship. He designed a basic assembly language for the ship’s computer, what is equivalent to a Commodore 64, and used Javascript to create an interpreter for that language.

                Hamilton said he enjoys learning languages, and has learned many over the years. Python is his favorite, he said, but he “appreciates” Javascript. “It’s a pretty awful language, but if you cut out all the bad parts and leave the good parts, it’s not too bad,” he said.

                If Hamilton could talk to his 19-year-old self, he said he would tell himself to pay more attention to resumes and references. He said part of him wishes he was “doing more sexy things in the programming world.”

                “Every time you do a job or project, think about it like it’s going on your resume, so you can later go back and demonstrate what you did and the relationships you formed,” he said. He said this is important not only to show potential employers, but also to show potential clients and partners.