David Streeter

"YESSS! Thanks to both egghead and Mr. Staltz for making this. I've been doing some cycle.js experiments at work and really hoping it "goes mainstream." By making an egghead series of videos, I think it'll help a lot. So thanks again to everyone involved!"

Hi Dave - tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you and what do you do for fun?

Heyo! I’m a full-stack web developer for Micron Technology. I love SCUBA diving, playing boozy board games, wiring soil moisture sensors to my plants and buying as many items during Steam sales as possible.

What do you do for a living and how long have you been in this industry?

My main focus is on making productivity-boosting tools for other team members at my company.

There’s no official job title for what I do and very few other employees understand what I make, let alone the technologies I use to create them. I also create interactive visualizations with D3.js.

I went to school for MicroElectronic Engineering, which is all about actually making computer chips, not designing them like an Electrical Engineer would do. This involves tons of varied fields like optics, plasmas, lithographic materials, diffusion and chemical vapor deposition.

However, once I started working with others in this field, it was clear that there was a lot of room for productivity improvement. Sometimes that’s an Excel Macro, a C# desktop application or an interactive website.

I found my passion for making tools and haven’t looked back. It’s a very rewarding feeling when you train someone on a tool that you made, see their face light up and know that you are saving them hours of work.

What brought you to egghead in the first place?

When I was starting on my first webapp, I found Angular and loved it’s magic-ness. Just by sprinkling some built-in Angular directives into basic HTML, I was able to quickly create dynamic and fast data driven sites.

During that time, egghead.io was one of the very few periodic video series that focused on Angular (which was still new and growing at the time). egghead helped me tremendously when I was still learning.

Since then, egghead has branched out to teaching other libraries, frameworks and paradigms. It’s a very useful place to look and see what’s popular and up-and-coming.

What are some big successes you’ve had recently?

I recently made a big department switch. While not as big as changing companies or going freelance, I’m still proud of getting myself out of a recent rut.

I’ve also just finished an Angular.js + D3.js + Crossfilter.js + DC.js project. In my opinion, the final version of that project is immensely more effective at cutting through the noise of data than some other third-party solutions (Tableau, Trifacta, etc.). If my company lets me, I would love to open-source it.

A personal project I’ve just finished was moving my sister’s crossfit website from Wordpress to Hugo, a static-site generator similar to Jekyll. The new site is super fast since everything is static, it is more SEO-friendly and way more robust to hackers (Wordpress is becoming the Windows 98 of CMS’s, too popular for its own good).

Check it out here! http://crossfitaevitas.com/

What are you most excited about for your career in 2016?

This new team that I’m working on will have lots of challenges, but also a lot of opportunities for me to greenfield new projects. They haven’t had anyone like me before, so I kind of feel like a wizard.

I’m also excited to start using a new Linux server that has Docker installed. Dependency-hell is a real thing that causes real money loss and downtime. With Docker, I have the advantages of a VM without the bloat/overhead.

Personally, once time dies down a lot, I want to finally start blogging and doing more worldwide networking instead of staying isolated behind a corporate proxy. Both literally and figuratively.

2016 is going to be a great and exciting year for JS. Sure there are lots of articles about “Javascript fatigue,” but I think that’s a good thing. In my opinion, growth and popularity is good for the community, and having more options is never a bad thing. Plus, I bet it’s good for egghead.io to have more developers seeking video tutorials!

David Streeter is a full-stack data wrangler at Micron Technology Inc. He enjoys saving his fellow employees time, creating interactive visualizations, those “A-ha!” moments of an elegant SQL query, SCUBA diving and pizza.

"I found my passion for making tools and haven’t looked back."