Preceden

Scott Johnson Career - 36 Years, 2 Kids, 2 Books, 1,200 Blog Posts, 15+ Shipped Products

Working for Myself

The NTERGAID Years - Products 1 to 6

1987 - 1996

  • 1987 Black Magic Hypertext Word Processor
  • 1988 Help System II
  • 1990 HyperWriter
  • 1990 Launched Consulting Services
  • 1991 HyperAwk
  • 1992 HyperWriter for Training
  • 1994 HyperWriter Professional
  • 1996 Sold NTERGAID
  • Title: Founder / President
  • Platform: Turbo Pascal; later automatically translated to C++

PC Magazine Editor's Choice Award - HyperWriter 2.53

05/28/1991

HotFacts

1999 - 1999

  • Failed DotCom
  • Shipped but didn't achieve product market fit ($$$)
  • Dynamic extraction of market research data like "We expect sales to reach $100 million in 2022"
  • Platform: Debian, Perl, MySQL; First work in Open Source

The Long Cold Dot Com Winter

2001 - 2003

  • 200 odd resumes
  • Not one interview
  • Learned PHP and MySQL

Inbox Buddy - Product 11

2003 - 2005

  • Outlook Add In for Spam and Smart Inbox Color Coding
  • Reunited with my NTERGAID co founder
  • Online sales (yes we sold a bunch)
  • Failed due to Feedster being so much bigger

The Feedster Years - Product 10

2003 - 2006

  • Originally "Roogle" (rss google)
  • Survived a slashdotting on day 1 but I was awake for 48 hours
  • Blog Search Engine
  • Team: 10 by the end
  • Funding: 4 million plus in venture
  • Location: San Francisco
  • Platform: PHP / MySQL / Large Linux Cluster (100 plus boxes), Custom 64 bit SGML search engine

Ookles

2006 - 2006

  • Family photo sharing
  • Failed due to investor / founder battle over features
  • Platform: PHP / MySQL / Linux / Ruby (wavelet math)

Regular, Random Consulting Projects

2009 - 2017

  • Dating Site: HowAboutWe.com
  • Radiation Math for Oncology

Learned DevOps

2013

  • Chef
  • Ansible

AppData Stage 2

2014 - 2015

  • "I Liked Building the Product so Much I Bought the Company"
  • Cofounder Bailed after 60 days
  • Team: 5
  • The $30,000 Elastic Search Mistake
  • Platform: Ruby / Rails / MySQL / Elastic Search / Sidekiq

GameNanny - Product 16

2016 - 2017

  • Alerting tool for parental concerns about DLC in video gaming
  • Failed due to lock downs on APIs in the gaming world

JobHound - Product 17

2017 - 2023

  • https://www.jobhound.io
  • I couldn't find a remote job after 98 resumes sent out
  • Got tired of using a spreadsheet for a database problem so wrote JobHound
  • CRM for Job Seekers
  • Helped Over 5,000 people find jobs
  • Got me back into building side projects in 2022
  • Unmonetizable space; people who don't have a job won't pay

Scott's Feed Finder - Product 18

2020 - 2023

Cartazzi - Product 21

2022 - 2023

  • www.cartazzi.com
  • Stop Living in Tab Hell
  • Thinking about it for probably 10 years; didn't think I had the skills; I did
  • Platform: Ruby / Rails / Postgres

Working for Others

The Dataware Years - Product 7

1996 - 1999

  • 1997 Dataware II KMS - My First Distributed System
  • Document Repository
  • Search Engine
  • Knowledge Directory
  • Title: Chief Technology Strategist
  • Team Size: 20 people; 3 time zones
  • Platform: Windows NT, Visual Studio 4.5, SQL Server

Took Gartner Magic Quadrant for Dataware II KMS

1997

Mascot Network - Branded Facebook for College Campuses - Product 8

1999 - 2000

  • Unslippable ship date; school starts whether the code is ready
  • 250,000 students on 75 campuses
  • 50 direct reports
  • Platform: IIS and ASP.NET and SQL Server
  • Cost me my marriage

MSDS Alerting System - Product 9

2002 - 2003

  • Team: 3 (myself, a product manager and the founder)
  • Platform: PHP, MySQL

eduFire - Product 12

2007 - 2009

  • Live language learning marketplace for personal video instruction
  • Pair Programmed Every Day for 3 Years
  • This made me a software engineer not a programer; discovery of TDD
  • Failed to raise series B
  • Founder spent the company's last $$$ going to TED conference
  • Laid off just before Christmas 2009
  • Team: 3 technical; 7 overall
  • Platform: Ruby / Rails / MySQL / Sidekiq

AppData Stage 1 - Product 13

2010 - 2014

  • Searchable App Metrics Database
  • Facebook Apps, iOS Apps, Android Apps
  • Took 4 hours a month of WordPress sys admin work to $250,000 per year consulting client over 9 months
  • Team: 3
  • Platform: Ruby / Rails / MySQL / Sidekiq

TheraChat, Inc - Product 14

2014 - 2015

  • Digital Health Company
  • Started as "make people healthier using the data from a fitness band"; complete fail
  • Broke into innovation teams
  • I came up with TheraChat - using Eliza derived technology for mental health since your therapist isn't always available
  • Whole company pivot
  • I left over HIPAA compliance issue
  • Platform: PHP Initially / Ruby for NLP and Eliza engine / Rails for web APIs

AppData Stage 3 - Making AppData into BankData - Product 15

2015 - 2017

  • FI Navigator was the product name
  • Took the AppData database of all apps and reduced it to just banking apps
  • Generated analytics of bank revenues nationally based on their app traffic

SEAS Education

2017 - 2019

  • Compliance Product for Special Education
  • Never actually used the product in 2 years
  • Ton of DevOps and Cloud Work
  • 25k annual AWS bill
  • Platform: Ruby / Rails / Postgres / Sidekiq

The Glass Ivy Years; Consulting Again!

2022 - 2023

  • Ruby / Rails / Sidekiq
  • Python / Django

Writing & Podcasting

Wrote First Book - The Electronic Publishing Construction Kit

1995

  • John Wiley and Sons

Blogging

2002 - 2023

  • Discovered Blogging
  • Relearned Writing in a Hypertext Context
  • One of the best engineering tools you can have

Co-Author of Essential Blogging by O'Reilly

2002

  • Wrote the chapters on Radio Userland

TechWarStories Podcast

2006 - 2006

Running in Production Podcast Interview

03/30/2020

Ruby 5 Podcast

2022 - 2023

  • Ruby / Rails Weekly "What's New in the Community" Show

Started 3rd Book: Practical Eldercare

2022 - 2023

Oxide and Friends Books in the Box

06/27/2022

Good Works

Taught Web Dev to Underprivileged Folks

2017 - 2018

  • Taught web dev to 2 homeless youth for 1 year
  • 1 dropped out
  • 1 now has his own local web dev firm

ADL - OHI (online hate index)

2019 - 2020

  • Software and Data Science Job
  • Never quite shipped
  • Left six months into the pandemic
  • Platform: Python / Postgres / PyTorch Custom Language Model / Ruby for Provisioning and AWS Deployment

covidnearme.org - Product 19

2020 - 2023

  • Shipped March 10, 2020 (pre shut down)
  • Team: 2 (me and a former FDA biologist)
  • Platform: Ruby / Rails / Postgres

Pizza For Ukraine - Product 20

2022 - 2023

  • Donation platform to send pizzas to people under siege in the Ukraine
  • https://pizzaforukraine.com/
  • Shipped over 3,000 pizzas
  • Platform: Ruby / Rails / Postgres

Epiphanies

Important Things I Learned

HyperAwk - The Power of Specialized Languages

1990

  • An Awk clone which could read from binary word processor files
  • Supported word / word perfect / wordstar / ami pro
  • Optimized to generate hypertext documents
  • The language you choose makes a fundamental difference to the product you build
  • Languages shape thinking; they have to by their nature

Remote Development Works

1997

  • Remote dev really works
  • Forces an explicit, written culture
  • Regular in person meetups really help

Blogging is a Powerful Engineering Tool

2002

  • Blogging is a better persistent knowledge capture tool than anything else
  • Result is a public, searchable archive of your engineering learnings
  • Gives you a way to work through a problem without ever worrying about a filename
  • Puts information into temporal order; technology changes with time so this really helps

Pair Programming Makes Better Code

2007

  • Pair programming makes better software
  • Did it for 3 years straight
  • Best software I ever wrote to this day
  • Best = Best Designed / Most Stable

TDD is Essential to Software Engineering

2007

  • Made me a software engineer not a programmer

Never Say No to an Opportunity

2010

  • Turned 4 hours per month of WordPress Sys Admin work to $250,000 annual consulting gig

REPL Based Development is the Future

2011

  • REPLs are a fundamental programming tool
  • If you start in a compiled language, it takes forever to grok this

Managing Data Scientists is Hard

2012

  • Science != Engineering

New Isn't Necessarily Better - The Elixir Fiasco

2016

  • Went Down the Elixir Rabbit Hole
  • Ultimately came home to Ruby and Rails

Podcasts Get Me Into a Development Frame of Mind

2022

  • CoRecursive made me excited about development