Episode 37 – Charles Max Wood on getting ahead as a developer

Charles Max Wood entered the field of technology at the age of 26. He has worked as a developer in different situations and now works freelance. Since becoming a freelance developer, Charles hasn’t looked back. He runs several podcasts, is writing a book and a course, and much more. Charles comes to us in this episode to share his knowledge on some of the lesser known career possibilities that technology offers today. So, click on over to episode 37 and listen in to Arsalan Ahmed and Charles Max Wood as we delve right in.

Charles Max Wood’s Bio:
Charles has been playing with various forms of programming since he was 13 but didn’t find his passion for it until he was introduced to Ruby at age 26. After a year of trying to balance his passion for programming with his career as Director of Support for Mozy, he left his management position for a career in programming.
Charles is passionate about helping others make technology work for them. He is a software consultant and leads his own team of freelance programmers. He’s been programming in Ruby and Ruby on Rails for 7 years and has built several websites including Twitter Clones and other social networks, payment systems, shopping carts, and blogs. He has also customized with Spree, Redmine, Discourse, and Instructure’s Canvas.
Charles’ ambitions in life are to be a dedicated husband and father to his wife, Heather, and his three children, to meet as many people as possible who share the same passions as he does, and to write a novel.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Hi, Everyone. Today I have a very special guest. Charles Max Wood, how are you?
Charles: I’m doing great. How are you?
Arsalan: It’s so good to have you. I’ve been listening to you on your podcasts, and you are an avid podcaster. I can say that because you have a lot of podcasts.
Charles: Yes, I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years.
Arsalan: Yes, and you are definitely somebody who I can look up to as someone who is successful in a lot of the things I want to do. The focus of my podcast is a little different from your podcasts, but I think we’re all in the same space.
Arsalan: So, you were telling me an interesting thing that happened when you were getting your first job. Can you tell us a little about that?
Charles: It’s kind of funny. I’m going to drop back just a little bit because I think it’s important to note that I think the people who listen to my podcast that I put on think that I’ve been programming forever. I’ve been programming professionally for about 10 years, as long as I’ve been podcasting. But, they don’t realize that we all got our start in the same way that they do. So, I just want to put that out there because sometimes things just work out differently than what you’d expect.
Charles: My first programming job I had been programming at the job previous to that. We had built a system for the tech support engineers to use in order to answer emails and keep track of phone requests and things like that. It provided a dashboard, a knowledge base, and things like that. So, I had been thinking that I wanted to go into programming, but I didn’t have the confidence to just go out and apply for programming jobs.
Charles: So, what wound up happening was I went and applied to a bunch of QA jobs because the last position that I held at that company was a QA position. Then I just applied on a fluke to a programming job. I went in for an interview and sat down with the general manager for about 20 minutes. He asked me a bunch of questions and did some interview stuff. Then we got on the phone with one of their programmers. At the time, the company was really focused around Java and .Net. They did a little bit of Flash and Flex, and they had one project on Ruby on Rails, which is what I was familiar with.
Charles: So, they got me on the phone with their one other Ruby programmer.

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