Adam Duro is Chief Technology Officer at Freebird Rides, based out of Los Angeles. Today I get to share his story of getting into tech without a CS degree. Coding bootcamps weren't a thing when Adam started!
Continue reading to hear about his experience learning to code and his advice for developers starting out with programming and looking for jobs in 2019.
Hey, thanks a lot for doing the interview! Could you introduce yourself?
My pleasure! I am 34 years old and have been working professionally in tech/software as an engineer, manager, and executive for over 15 years. I grew up in Sedona, Arizona and moved to Los Angeles, California as a teenager. I started working professionally in tech at the age of 17.
These days my focus from a stack perspective is mostly JavaScript/TypeScript, both front-end and back-end, as well as infrastructure and DevOps architecture. I got my start at a traditional shared web hosting provider back when web developers were called Web Masters (I still laugh at that) doing mostly static HTML/CSS, some PHP, and helping administer Linux web servers.
From there I moved on to agency style companies doing hundreds of projects over the years with various different stacks: PHP, Ruby on Rails, ActionScript3/Flash, JavaScript, Django, Golang, and tons of different DevOps tools. I started taking on management/leadership positions about 7 years ago. I love being able to combine my love of engineering, passion for building positive culture, bringing out people’s best, and building an organization.
What first got you interested in programming and how did you learn?
I started with the early days of consumer internet. I was fascinated by my grandfather’s Prodigy internet service, and his Packard Bell 386. I begged my parents to get us a subscription to AOL when it came out. I was a gamer and a few friends and I were in a guild and they mentioned wanting to build a website for our guild, so I went home and started tinkering with HTML (there was no such thing as CSS then).
From that point forward I was always a techie kid, building my own computers, hacking around with different scripting languages, and eventually when Flash came out, started tinkering with that. After high school, and a failed run at becoming a child actor (my highlight was an episode of Malcolm in The Middle, and a bit part in a Mary Kate and Ashley DVD release), I woke up to the fact that my hobby could actually be a career, and took some community college courses in software development and design.
It clicked pretty fast. I ended up transferring to a trade school, with a web dev and design program. There I was introduced to OOP principles through what then was the brand new ActionScript 3 language for Flash. I would say that was when the fuel hit the fire. I dropped out after about two years when I was offered a full time web development job at a local agency.
Since then it’s been all learning on the job and staying super hungry to push myself to always be learning and advancing. I try to study two steps ahead of where my current skill set is. I ask lots of questions, and don’t stop till I know “why” the code I’m writing, or the tool I’m using does what it’s doing.
