The West Virginia Coding Club was honored to have Nolan Love, Tech Lead for Avatars project for Instagram (Meta) as a recent Guest Speaker.
Nolan grew up, as one of seven children, on a farm in New Hampshire experiencing the life of a farm and the outdoors. Eventually, as he was growing up he was the recipient of a Commodore 64 computer.
His family was of modest means to buy games so he had to find other avenues to play games on his Commodore 64. Nolan was able to get Run magazine, which had computer programs listed and he was able to type them in and learn about coding. The first game he and his bothers then coded on their own was "Death Corvette" that had a car and helicopter in which you could shoot a lightning bolt from the car to try to hit the helicopter. Through that and other programs he learned about sprites, graphics and controls, as well as how to manipulate them.
As Nolan learned he realized that he wanted to make his programming useful. His Dad asked Nolan if he could use the computer to help keep a customer list to mail Christmas cards. Nolan said yes and coded a database for his Dad.
Nolan took one computer class, learning Pascal in High School. Nolan's focus was to go to college for Medicine (Biomedical Engineering) at Johns Hopkins University, so his focus wasn't coding.
Nolan is familiar with West Virginia, as he was one of the select few students from around the country in 1991 to attend the National Youth Science Camp.
In college, Nolan took one computer class and learned Unix. He had a work study job and one of the opportunities through that job was to help the Center for Social Organization of Schools organize attendees for a conference. What normally took many people all night to organize attendees into seminars by their preferences using index cards the night before the conference, could now be handled by a computer program (algorithm) that Nolan wrote. Once Nolan wrote the program and had the data from the conference, he could have all attendees sorted into seminars by their preference in less than three minutes, instead of many hours. Nolan shared that over 60 people registered late on the first day of the conference and needed to be added to the group of those that pre-registered. Once he had the additional data for new attendees, he could rerun the program and in less than three minutes had all attendees sorted into seminars by their preference. Through his coding work, he created value and something useful and was able to leverage that to be compensated significantly better.
After college Nolan joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Guinea, West Africa - No computers during his time there, but when completed he wanted to travel Europe like many of his compatriots, but needed funds. He found an opportunity to build a database program for the Peace Corps office to help organize the volunteer health records and was able to finance his European travels.
Upon returning to the United States, Nolan moved to San Francisco, CA and decided to get into his engineering/creative side while the Dot Coms were starting. Nolan didn’t have a lot of formal training with coding and learned after his first failed interview he needed to learn more about coding.
He was more prepared for his next interview and found that they recognized his other skills, even though he didn't yet have the programming experience in the language they were using. Once he started, Nolan was surrounded by programmers from top schools as he developed his skills at Art Technology Group, which built many of the first online stores. Nolan became a Full-Stack developer.
From there as the Dot Com Bubble was bursting, he with a few others, went out on their own and formed Big Bang Consulting, their own company. Their focus was to charge a little less and do the same quality work (e-commerce solutions) for major companies.
Even though remote working and telework have become a normal experience in today's society, Nolan started working from home in 2002, a full 20 years ago.
Once Facebook started - there were apps you could build on it. Nolan made a program one weekend that would take your profile photo and explode it into a pixelated image with brightness and then replace the pixels with photos of your friends based on the brightness to change your profile photo into a mosaic made from your friends' photos. It was called Mesaic. After a short while Energizer corporation reached out to Nolan to let him know he had made the best Mosaic maker of about a dozen that existed. They asked to see if he would develop it further for them so they could have on their Facebook page. Nolan's challenge was to try to figure out what to ask them for to be compensated for his work. One friend he spoke with suggested $1,000 and another friend suggested $100,000. He decided to go big and asked for $100,000. They said it was too much, but offered him $50,000. Afterwards, he doubled down on this opportunity and built on his ability to create these types of things.
Nolan explained about how a brain thinks in relation to how a Democracy works.- (Brain is democracy, receives inputs and makes a decision and communicates that to friends/others and is weighted based on the relationship they have. Model that is like using a computer. Great way for Democracies to be the brain and neurons to be the weighted relationship with friends. This concept is what is now known as Liquid Democracy. From that idea, Nolan created PollVault - which allowed voters to start connecting via a social network. Groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters became interested in this opportunity to help voters connect on issues. In approaching the platform for building this, Nolan realized that using Java would be very work intensive, even with his FullStack experience of over 15 years. He discovered a better language - Python, that he could learn and it would get him there faster. So, Nolan abandoned his comfort zone. He also deployed PollVault in the Cloud versus his own servers.
Even with significant efforts, his start up failed. It was just too controversial to make money from voting information platforms at that time. After, Facebook recruited him to work for them. Nolan spent six solid weeks studying for the interview. He asked them what he should study to prepare and they suggested the book "Cracking the Coding Interview" and the website LeetCode to learn how they wanted him to program.
Nolan prepared and was offered the opportunity to join Facebook, now Meta. There was an opportunity for him to work with Facebook, Instagram, Oculus or Whatsapp. Nolan chose Instagram and began working with their Stories product. He is now a Tech Lead on the Avatars Team. They launched in January 2022! This is part of their work on building out the Metaverse. In the near future we will be able to embody ourselves in the metaverse, that digital dimension, now using VR (Virtual Reality) headsets, soon glasses and maybe someday even contact lenses, he thinks. Nolan is excited to be a part of this new technology and working with the sharp minds that are on the team. Nolan is humbled that his work goes out to over one billion mobile devices when they send out their product.
Nolan's Advice:
Follow your passion! Be useful with your skill set by making yourself useful to other people. Don’t prejudge - smart capable people come in all shapes and sizes. Be humble enough to not need to be the smartest person in the room, and be equally kind. Be smart and be nice. Surround yourself with smart people who support you and encourage you. Go big! Let go of the things you are good at and learn the new. Believe in yourself. Judge your value from the point of view of the value you are providing to others. Technology changes so rapidly!!! Some of you may be working with Quantum computing in the future. Information is not the most important part, it is how you find and organize the information, as the information will change. Don’t get entrenched in only one language or computer system. Stay agile. Be kind.
It is great to have novel ideas, but it is foolish to believe that your idea is the only instance out there. Originality is less important than the ability to technically execute with excellence. It's critical to collaborate and get your message out to everyone, in order to win or to be a successful entrepreneur. The ability to evangelize your idea many times can make the difference in being successful.
Dan McElroy, President of the WV Coding Club, commented, "Nolan has and is doing groundbreaking work thanks to his coding skills and his approach to work and life. We are humbled to have him share his story with our Coding Club students! Thank you Nolan for your time and inspiring words."
Keep Coding!