The WV Coding Club had the privilege of interacting with a West Virginian and West Virginia Remote Worker, James Koval. The journey he has taken with his coding experience and skills has taken him out of West Virginia to some well known companies and then back to West Virginia where he works remotely for a company based in California.
James was interested in coding at an early age and describes himself as a mostly self-taught programmer. With friends, they gave themselves challenges / projects to code. That helped to make them learn about different coding constructs and how to make things work.
James went to college in St. Louis, MO and earned a BS in Computer Science. While in college he had an intership with the State of WV Office of Technology focused on CyberSecurity using Google Maps API as part of the projects.
From there he worked with the Human Genome Project. After some experience there he went on to Twitter and explained it was a long process of 10 interviews to be hired. At Twitter, in San Francisco, CA, he worked on the International Team working on Twitter's translate function and working with users around the world on Twitter's UI (User Interface). For James, the perks of working for Twitter were great, but San Francisco was a very crowded place. At one point, Twitter had a major layoff and James saw good coworkers losing their jobs and he decided it was time to move on.
James found an opportunity with Amazon with their Amazon Photos project - a lot like Google and Facebook photos - at the time this was a new product being developed and he was a part of it when it was first released. After some time in Seattle, WA, James wanted to be closer to family in West Virginia and came back to Charleston, where he worked with Housing and Urban Development, as a Government Contractor.
After some time, he started looking for Remote Work using various websites for Remote Workers. James found a company that was Green Energy - a Solar Startup - Aurora Solar. He works with Front End (JavaScript) and Back End (Ruby on Rails). A company that utilizes Aurora Solar’s work and data is Solar Holler in WV. Part of Aurora Solar's work is to utilize Lidar Data - to get detailed images of people’s roofs to model in 3-D. Companies can pay for Roof Image and Roof Modeling to determine the viability of and how to install solar.
Internships may be a possibility. Aurora Solar's employees has at least doubled since James joined, now at about 200 staff. He was able to get another WV friend to be hired there and work remotely.
Advice from James - don’t worry as much about which program language you learn. It is easy to translate skills to another programming language. Collaborate with a friend or someone for a side project to develop programming and debugging skills.
Languages James has programmed in (not a complete list): Visual Basic, Java, Linux, Bash, Perl, Ruby on Rails (at Twitter), Java Script (at Twitter), Angular, React, WordPress PHP, AWS (at Amazon), Active Directory, TypeScript, Python, Scala, DotNET, ObjC
Dan McElroy, President of the WV Coding Club, said, "James is a West Virginian who has shown that remote work from West Virginia is not only possible, but a realistic way to have a good job and stay in West Virginia. We thank James for being a great example to our Coding Club students."
To learn more about the West Virginia Coding Club go to www.WVCoding.org