Matt Goucher

"I just wanted to shoot out a quick thanks to egghead - your service is awesome and is a great way to learn. I thought I was "too cool" for paid learning services, but I took the plunge and I'm glad I did - I got bootstrapped on the principles of React before I started my new job. Again, thanks for what you're doing!"

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

My name is Matt Goucher. I'm a self-taught software engineer originally from Sacramento, California. When I'm offline, I'm a gym goer, craft beer drinker and aspiring bowler.

True story, my picture is on the wall of a bowling ally for shooting 299, hitting 11 of 12 consecutive strikes. A month ago, I packed up my stuff and moved to Washington state for a new job opportunity.

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

In the last month I accepted a job with Concur, a Washington based travel and expense management company.

My career got started six years ago, when I was building websites for small businesses in my hometown from the library at my high school. From there, I landed a job at a (at the time) small startup company in Sacramento. I joined the team as a junior front-end engineer, and worked my way up to a lead front-end role.

From there, I joined the team at the boutique creative agency, Creativedash. There, I was in charge of building and maintaining a popular design asset marketplace, called UI8.

What brought you to egghead in the first place?

I've known about egghead for awhile now, after watching some of John's early tutorials on YouTube.

I hadn't considered paying for a learning service, until one of my close friends had talked about how great of a tool it is. When I started my new job, I knew I needed to learn React and I figured I would just read through the documentation and pick it up. After seeing the multiple React courses on the site, I quickly signed up.

What are some big successes you’ve had recently?

In the first week of my new gig, it was clear that I needed to get up to speed quickly.

I worked through a set of the React videos in my off time, and was beginning to understand a lot more of the code I was looking at, at work. Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I'm actively contributing to a few of our codebases and building widgets to be used by other teams in the organization. Thanks egghead!

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

I'm most excited about getting more involved in the technologies that I use on a daily basis.

I'm fortunate because the company I'm working for embraces a continued education. The leadership in my organization is extremely forward thinking, and wants to use modern tools to solve problems. I'm hoping to become an active member of the Node community, here in Seattle.

Matt Goucher is a Washington based software engineer, with a background in javascript. With several years of experience in a wide range fields like e-commerce and the music industry, he's well versed in both technical and non-technical aspects of business. He's currently focused on all things Node and leveraging modern frameworks to build large scale applications.

"I thought I was 'too cool' for paid learning services..."