"How I Went from" is an ongoing blog series that highlights our employees' different journeys to InterWorks. The results are pretty diverse, but each story is special in its own right.
I describe my previous job as “wildly unfulfilling.” My work didn’t feel like it was appreciated or mattered much. With hopes of finding something better, I brushed back up on my web development skills that I learned back in high school. Along the way, I did some online classes on data, and this led me to the idea of data science. My brother-in-law worked at a place called InterWorks and they happened to be hiring for just that.
The interview process was long. InterWorks wants to be certain a candidate is a good fit and there’s heaps of enthusiasm for them to be hired. It’s hard to get to a “hell yes!” about someone from a single thirty-minute phone conversation, though, so we did several of them. After HR was sure that I wasn’t psycho and a couple technical chats with consultants, it was finally time for an in-person interview. This was supposed to be with a data engineer named Derek Heksher but he was pulled into urgent client work. If that hadn’t happened my whole story could have been very different.
Derrick Austin tagged in for Derek (don’t worry, there’s no more Derrick’s in my tale. Two is enough!). We met for coffee and talked for a couple hours. I don’t remember all the topics we covered but surely some of it was job-related. His role didn’t have a lot of overlap with the one I was in the running for, but we had a lot in common human-wise. If Derrick represented the vibe of the InterWorks community, I was stoked at the chance to be part of it.
For those who are concerned, he did ask me about programming and data science. Derrick is a good interviewer! In fact, we had a conversation about web development that proved fortuitous for me. But more on that later.
The first in-person interview went well and so did the rest of them. To be fair, if they didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. In August of 2018, after the final interview and a couple painstaking days of waiting, they offered me the job!
Now that I was on the team, the plan was to hop on some data science projects. Unfortunately, they weren’t plentiful, and what we did have went to Rachel Kurtz who was much better than I was anyways. While the projects I was hired to do weren’t available, InterWorks had a wealth of Tableau gigs at the time. So, they decided to throw me at one and see what happens.
The gig was “teaching assistant” for a Tableau training in San Francisco. To be completely honest, my Tableau knowledge was just a touch more than the students’. InterWorks is great at finding the kind of person that can be thrown in the fire and invent a fire extinguisher before being burned. I discovered this about myself during the training and was able to find the answers for the questions I was asked.
It was frantic but I think I did a pretty good job at looking like I knew what I was talking about. The trip wasn’t without its woes, though. This happened right after Kevin Durant left the OKC Thunder for the Golden State Warriors. The San Franciscans made sure to take their jabs at their OKC-native teaching assistant. Don’t worry, though, I was quick to remind them that their studio apartments were three times more expensive than my house. I don’t think it was that petty. And while our cost of living is still much lower, we managed to win a championship without KD. Okay, maybe it was a little petty.
After the Tableau training, we were back trying to find something for me to do. I had fun but didn’t feel like Tableau trainings were in my future. The folks in charge went to Derrick (not Derek) and asked if he liked this Justin guy enough to do some work on his web app, Portals for Tableau (Which you might recognize now as Curator by Interworks). Now, had it been Derek who interviewed me back then this piece could have been titled “How I Went from Data Scientist to Data Engineer.” Instead, Derrick said “sure let’s give it a try,” and I’ve been on his team ever since.
Remember when I mentioned that web development conversation would prove fortuitous? I imagine so, it was only a few paragraphs above this one. Our meetings still function the same as that fateful interview. Twenty-five minutes about running or TV shows or kids and five minutes at the end to chat business. That’s what they are now at least. In the beginning it was much more him teaching me how to do this job.
Above: In case you’re wondering, Derrick and I still get along famously after all the years working together. Here’s us at the last company summit doing very important workplace activities.
The very first change I ever authored for the app was attempting to restyle the login page. It was immediately followed by another change that fixed everything I broke with the first one. I had programmed before, but was new to working on an app this big and collaborating on a development team. I was once again thrown into the fire but adapted and learned, each day getting better. It’s an interesting “before and after” comparison looking at my more recent changes. They’ve gone from the botched login page restyling that only changed a handful of files to much more sophisticated architecture changes that adds swathes of features still used today. I’m by no means the best developer out there, but I blow 2018 Justin out of the water.
Nowadays, my responsibilities have widened to other software projects and even some agentic work. As the technology gets better, I get to be on the bleeding-edge playing with the tools and making cool things. Over the past few months, Derrick and I have made a fleet of agents that help Curator stay stable and remove some of the tedium of managing an app for us. My brainchild is an agent that listens for errors that happen on live sites and then drafts changes to fix those bugs, all before a human even knows something went wrong. It’s a tough job to get bored with, and not what I thought I’d be doing when I first applied.
It’s been a journey, and honestly it continues to be. I’ve been here for nearly a decade now, going from data scientist to Tableau trainer to software developer to AI shepherd. I enjoy what I do and feel that my work is appreciated. I don’t know what the future has in store, but I’m sure it will be wildly fulfilling.
