We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re continuing our Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Today, we’re meeting the biggest Pika fan, Barry Hess…
Who are you? (Who, who, who, who?)
My name is Barry Hess. I grew up in a rural part of Minnesota where the population of the entire county is less than 10,000 people. After getting a college degree in Computer Science, I moved to a metropolis of 25,000 people in southern Minnesota. I live here with my wife and three daughters, though our children are actively growing and slowly moving out into the world to create their own lives. 😭
I’ve been coding off and on for nearly thirty years now, though there was a bit of a dalliance in management for a while.
What do you do at Good Enough?
I started Good Enough with Shawn.
For the past year my primary work has been Pika, which is near and dear to my heart. An illustration of me even sits on the Pika homepage, yet somehow Pika still keeps attracting new customers. Baffling! To accomplish my work, I mostly code Ruby on Rails while sometimes talking to AIs to help me write JavaScript. I also try to do some marketing work as best I can, write a bit, and help out with our other products.
What are the tools of your trade?
Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, repeat. I’ve been using RubyMine as my editor for the past year, along with Cody as my AI assistant.
(I’m thinking of taking a month to try using a more integrated AI code editor.) While AI is more of a sounding board for my Rails work, it has become key for me to be able to accomplish anything at all in the JavaScript world. Aside from that, it’s my trusty MacBook Pro, a browser, Terminal, and reading the docs.
What’s your origin story?
I entered college as a Physics major, but knew enough about myself to take a Computer Science class in my first semester. I think I changed my major within a week. Though I loved computers, there wasn’t much programming in my life before college. My coding through college was primarily C++ for class, and I loved iterating on the little projects to make them more and more user friendly. From there I got into web development of the basic sort: HTML, CSS, SSI, and eventually PHP.
My career started at an insurance company, which onboarded new employees with an intensive, three-month COBOL training class. So, yes, I spent a couple of years being paid to code COBOL before transitioning to a Java team. After about six years, I had an early-life crisis and left that job for parts unknown. (Literally, I had no new job lined up, and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Do not try this at home!)
I was very fortunate to run into the Harvest founders, and was able to start working with them from (nearly) the beginning of that product. It was there that I was able to experience the tiny, scrappy startup; the growing, scrappy startup; and eventually the medium-sized company, established in its niche. I went from coding many of the original features to helping build a team to managing the entire technical team.
Eventually, it was time to move on to a new experience, and here I am at Good Enough, trying something rather different!
What’s new? How are things going?
Oh, you know, life keeps barreling on! As I mentioned above, our children continue to grow. We have a tight-knit family and love to hang out together. We also love to travel together! We just got back from visiting our oldest while she was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. It was fantastic.
Our middle child is heading to college in the fall, and we’ll continue to adapt. As you can imagine, this is all bittersweet, but we are doing our best to cherish the moments and enjoy watching our children grow into lovely adults.
What’s your drink of choice?
In the past few years, I’ve gotten into making cocktails.
I don’t make a cocktail often, but I really enjoy the variety of flavors that exist out there—I had no idea until I started making them!
I love a good Negroni. Paper Planes are awesome, as are Last Words and Enzonis. If I’m being honest, though, the most frequently drunk cocktail in the Hess household is the Gin & Tonic.
Any parting words of wisdom for our dear readers?
It’s okay to be mildly addicted to Fortnite if you take care to play with family and friends. It’s a fun game that’s always changing. The fun is enhanced by planning together and succeeding (or more likely failing) together.
When you play too much alone, and spend all of your “content viewing time” watching YouTube videos about how to play better (even though you never really get that good because you can’t put that much time into training), then perhaps you’ve went too far.
I may or may not be giving this speech to myself. Don’t worry, I have a totally balanced Fortnite life these days!
Where can you be found on the internet?
This blog, Pika’s blog, and my blog on Pika.
I’m also haltingly involved in various social sites @bjhess:
Want to know other things about our team? Let us know what really interests you!