Justin Shanks

What do you do?

I'm working in Santa Monica, CA (Silicon Beach, 2 blocks from the pier!) for a company called Mammoth Media. We are a startup focusing on mobile apps for entertainment and are working on apps and features for some major movie and tv studios. We are a child company of the startup incubator called Science Inc, so I share a building with many other startups.

My job title is Director of Backend Engineering. I manage a team of NodeJS developers while also spending 75% of my time coding. We produce all the http api's for the mobile apps as well as the platform http api's. We also create and support internal management tools and jobs. As an example of a recent project, we designed and built an auto-renewing subscription and virtual currency system for our Arena gameshow app.

How did you get there?

I started programming in Web Design class at Whitewater High School (back in 1998 with Netscape 3 and Internet Explorer 2). I attended UW Whitewater for 1 year and worked for the campus helpdesk for 2 years as a desktop support tech before moving into the role of Research Assistant to the chancellors office. After that I worked as technical support for an ISP and desktop technician for a health care company in Madison. During the down times at those jobs, I was teaching myself perl, javascript, php, sql, and html/css on a few side projects. Due to my side project examples and experience, I was able to get an interview and first job as a Jr Developer in 2006 for a library supply company in Fort Atkinson. I continued my side projects and this lead to my next job as a Sr Developer/Architect for a publishing company in Fort Atkinson. In this role I was able to lead several projects to create an internal cms and website template system which allowed the company to relaunch 20 websites in under 11 months on the same backend. My next role was to help manage a team of 45 developers (in Chicago and Latvia) to support a major ecommerce website and its warehouse operations.

At this point in my career, I had about 10 years experience in backend web development and a few years experience in tech management. My wife and I decided to move to CA and I found a short term javascript developer job in CA while I looked for a more permanent role. A CTO at Science found my resume online and contacted me about the role with Mammoth.

The most critical experience in my career was gained when I first started programming and pursued my side projects. None of them have become what I originally envisioned and all of them (from that time) are now retired, but I believe it was that passion and unrelenting pursuit of learning in order to build some of those side projects that got me through the right interviews to land the entry level roles.

What advice do you have for current computer science students?

If you are interested in programming or development, I strongly encourage you to go all in with a side project using the technologies that excite you. Whether it be a mobile app, a game, a website, etc, come up with a vision and get as far as you can. Try to find a mentor or web communities that can help answer your questions when you are stuck. The experience you will gain doing this is beyond anything you can gain from reading a book about programming or just taking classes. I spend a decent amount of time reviewing resumes and interviewing now, and one of the things that I always look for and ask about are side projects. If you are looking at 4 year schools, technical schools, or code bootcamps I recommend you find one that focuses on project based work in small teams since this will give you some needed experience and a role to own within the small team.

Contact information:

jshanman@gmail.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-shanks-1817121b/

Posted July 16, 2018