Welcome - Jack Skinner
Hello everybody, please welcome the awesome Jack Skinner to the MYOBapi team. It’s awesome to have Jack joining us and bringing with him a ton of developer experience, passion and energy.
Jack officially is taking over the API Evangelism here on the team and will be the key contact for our tech space - but before we talk about that, I thought we’d get to know Jack a little. I took a little time to interview him over a coffee just for this blog.
Keran: So Jack, welcome to the team. You’ve been here for a few weeks now, how about we start off with when did you start with MYOB and what was the first job we gave you?
Jack: I think the first challenge was putting up with Keran’s awful jokes. It’s okay though because I’m a pretty terrible pun-ster myself. In all seriousness though if I remember correctly it was to throw myself at some OAuth and API code to explore the API. Took about 20-30 minutes to get setup which was pretty groovy.
K: Awesome. Now I know you have a strong tech background, but in 3 sentences can you tell us a little about your history?
J: I’m a Sydney chap at heart, and have lived here my whole life. I’ve held a variety of dev and product roles in the past few years and been an active conference and meetup attendee/organiser. Excited to take a more focused roll in developer experience and tech communities across Australian and New Zealand. When I announced on my personal blog that I’d be joining MYOB a few months ago I was absolutely stunned at the positive reaction on Twitter. MYOB sure does have an active dev community and I’m really looking forward to it!
K: PHP seems to be strong there for you. Can you tell us a bit more about your passion for PHP?
J: I started learning basic web tech (HTML etc.) about 12 years ago before diving into Python and PHP. Almost exclusively self taught PHP gave me the chance to freelance and earn some side income through schooling. Fast forward a few years and I’ve been lucky enough to be a conference speaker, a meetup organiser and a frequent tech event attendee. PHP has always been the centre of my coding but I’m always curious about what makes code (and data) tick irrespective of the language.
K: I’m glad you talked about the tech community and your work there, after all it was this through this tech community that we meet. What was it about API Evangelism and MYOB that attracted you to this role?
J: I’ve always been involved in the tech community in my own time; evenings and weekends, flights and accommodation. The chance to work more closely with the tech community through evangelism was not only a change from my normal coding but also an exciting chance to pursue what had been a hobby for many years.
K: If you could change ONE thing in our developer program - what would it be?
J: Just one?
K: Yes, lets start with one, I know we both have LONG lists ha ha ha...
J: There’s so many awesome things our developer community are building with our API’s its difficult to pick just one part to highlight. I think ultimately having more people find and develop with our API would be fantastic for the entire community so making the getting started guide a delightfully simple process is probably going to be where I first set my sights.
K: What’s ONE thing that you wish all developers were thinking more about?
J: Testing! And not just your unit tests. I do it myself all the time and dive in and write code I forget to plan, experiment and then execute. I’m a huge fan of tools like Fiddler and postman and they’re not just useful for experimenting but also testing and debugging too! Hmm, perhaps I should write a blog on this?
K: Okay we talk about #evaglistlyf - living/working on the road. Where is the ‘strangest’ place you’ve had a client meeting, where is the best place and why?
J: I once worked in an office where one room had fake grass with a park bench, the other with sand and beach chairs. Fantastic and odd spaces for meetings but sand got everywhere! In the last few months alone I’ve had meetings in cabs, while boarding a plane (literally) and sitting in hotel foyers with local coffee. No day is like any other in this job!
K: Ha ha brilliant - okay, my coffee is almost done, lets wrap this up. Whats the next conference you’ll be speaking at, and what topic?
J: I’m making an appearance at OSDC next week to talk about my experience teaching software development and to co-present a security workshop on OWASP. But I’m really looking forward to BuzzConf! Have you heard about BuzzConf? Let me tell you about BuzzConf! Or rather… read my post about it!
K: Okay last thought - how do our developer community get in touch with you?
J: Most importantly nothing is changing with API support, so if you need help drop us an email ([email protected]) or a sneaky tweet at @myobapi. I tweet my travels via @developerjack and there’s a few conference posts on instagram by the same handle too. I also occasionally blog/rant/post on my own site so feel free to follow along there too!
K: great, thanks Jack great to have you on to the team!
We are super excited to welcome Jack to the team, he’s already challenging us and has a list of “tweaks” a mile long he wants to work through. I know he’s loving getting out and engaging with you, learning about how you use our APIs and your products.
2016 is going to be an AWESOME year for our developer community with Jack engaging & supporting with you all.