Norik Davtian

“EVERYTHING is on Egghead before I even ask for it. I just wanted to say that this was the best investment of my life. My $95 investment made a $20,000 difference in my salary! And of course, I’ve been telling all of my friends to join ever since."

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

I am a full-stack software engineer. I’ve been developing websites and web apps for over 10 years now and I live in Los Angeles area.

I started in freelance web development when IE6 was still around. I also enjoy reading other people's code on Github, learning about new technologies and working on smaller side projects for fun.

And I can’t forget daytrading. I am getting really good at it. :-)

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

I work for a startup airline called Surf Air, as Senior Software Engineer. We are a full-stack JavaScript shop.

Surf Air is an all-you-can-fly membership airline (cool, huh?). We are literally revolutionizing the way you fly with a simplified and enhanced experience that provides you more time, more comfort and more freedom.

Before Surf Air, I started a web engineering company with my friend where we would provide a range of services such as websites, web applications and web strategy.

And before that I was doing freelance work that included graphics, animation and web design.

What brought you to Egghead in the first place?

At my previous company we had to build web applications of different sizes, and most of the time the process of switching context between frontend and PHP backend was very tedious. Cutting development cost and time was very important for us, and Angular was one of the technologies that quickly got our attention for those reasons.

I was looking for a specific topic on Angular and found the Egghead website. The videos were very engaging and in-depth. Fast forward a bit and I mastered Angular mostly by watching Egghead videos. I would say probably for every section in Angular API doc you can find a corresponding Egghead video. And that's very helpful when you have to absorb a lot of information in a short period.

What are some big successes you’ve had recently?

As a lead software engineer, it’s important to make the right (very important) technology decisions. I always come across questions like:

• Should we go with Angular, React, or [insert another technology or framework]?
• Should we transition to ES6 now or is it too early?
• How easy will it be to hire developers that know the technologies that we use? If not, can we train them quickly?
• How can we automate some of the development tasks?

What about testing?

Egghead covers answers to all of these questions in a nice and organized playlist format. And you only really need to spend 20 minutes a day just watching videos to learn what you need to know.

Best of all, knowing answers to all of these questions can make a huge difference in your salary level.

“I was able to ask for $20,000 raise and got it because I know that the value I deliver as an expert in my domain would justify my request, and would not have been possible if I did not invest in my education.”

And I attribute most of it to Egghead series.

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

There are three things I’m really excited about for this next year:

1. Surf Air. We have an awesome team, and being on a full JavaScript stack helps us to deliver products faster to our members.
2. Node and next version of JavaScript. Being on NodeJS enables us to start experimenting with ES6 on the server side while frontend technologies and browsers catch up.
3. Diving into Angular 2 in production. Egghead videos are already out on Angular 2. You should check them out if you haven’t.

Norik is a full-stack software engineer at Surf Air, an all-you-can-fly membership airline based in Los Angeles. He tweets about front-end, JS, software, architecture, APIs, interfaces and Interactions @NorikDavtian.

“My $95 investment made a $20,000 difference in my salary!"