Justin Jones

“Hey guys, just wanted to let you know how valuable the knowledge on your site has been to me over the last few months. I am taking on a job that is using Redux + React for it's frontend infrastructure. I wouldn't have been able to take it on in such a short period of time without the help of the "Getting Started with Redux" tutorial. Additionally, I have been able to speed up the time it was taking to teach our team Angular with the help of the courses you guys provide.”

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

I'm a software engineer, and am currently living and working in Sacramento. I gravitate toward building things, non-software related: think food, motorcycles and electronics.

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

I'm currently a software engineer at a company called Queue Ticketing. We focus on venue and festival management. Point of entry, point of sale, booking and planning.

I have been designing and building websites and applications for the past nine years. ####What brought you to Egghead in the first place? I’m not sure if I remember - it could have been Reddit (/r/angular or /r/javascript). ####What are some big successes you’ve had recently? There is a project coming up that I will be collaborating on that is going to be built upon Redux + React. Having a background in Backbone, and then shifting into Angular (a little late in the game), it was somewhat of an overwhelming idea to learn yet another library/framework.

“I wasn't all that looking forward to feeling like I had started over.”

After having a conversation with the colleague I would eventually be taking this on with (who is considerably more experienced and flexible to new skillsets than I), it was obvious that I needed to get into Redux (well, Redux + React + ES6). So after downloading a few boilerplate repos, and seeing it all working and very efficiently, inspecting the code didn't get me very far in understanding how it worked.

I put it aside for a few days, and felt quite frustrated.

I received a newsletter from Egghead, and noticed it made mention of Redux. Long story short: I went through the videos much faster than I thought I would, had a much more comprehensible understanding of something I knew nothing of days prior and was able to have confident conversations about the fundamentals of two new-to-me libraries.

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

It's easy to know enough about something to be dangerous. To hack, to get shit done…

But the breaking down the barrier between doing the things I’m comfortable and good at, and being constantly learning something new and uncomfortable… I feel that's what 2016 is going to be about.

Justin Jones, software engineer. I like making things, real or not. My wife is rad. My pets are neat. My hobbies are too many and ill-funded.

“I was able to have confident conversations on two new libraries”