We had the opportunity to learn from another great speaker, Mr. Kel Cecil, Vice President of Engineering with InspectionGo.
Kel was born and grew up in Princeton, West Virginia. His parents are very hard working people and wanted Kel to have the opportunities they did not. Kel became mostly self-taught in coding as he took the opportunity to benefit from his education. Kel attended Princeton Senior High School and Mercer County Technical Education Center, where he first built his own computer.
For his first computer program, Kel wrote a script to shut lab computers down remotely, which allowed the teachers to use it on their computer to shut computers down for all the students at the end of each day, saving time for all the teachers. This was also the first time Kel made money from programming.
Kel went on to West Virginia University Institute of Technology to study Computer Science and earn his Bachelor of Science and then earned his Masters degree in Computer Science combined with a certificate in Computer Forensics at West Virginia University (WVU).
Since his family is in West Virginia, Kel didn’t want to go far away from family, but wanted to be connected to opportunities in the software industry. Kel has been able to reside in Morgantown, WV while pursuing his career.
Kel had a few different jobs that gave him experience and helped him to learn about other opportunities, while working from West Virginia. A major step forward was as a Senior Software Engineer at Realtor.com. From there he became involved with a new startup and is now the Vice President of Engineering at InspectionGo (www.inspectiongo.com) One of the main focuses of the business is to help Home Inspectors have access to tools to build their business. They are developing a program called Keystone, that is preparing for open usage in the home inspection industry. Keystone allows inspection business owners to book and interact with their clients more efficiently by leveraging data sources to help office staff make better decisions when booking.
For example, inspection companies deal with different requirements from state to state . One requirement, in some states, is the requirement to track all versions of service agreements. Keystone enables clients to sign and tracks all versions of agreements up to the point of signature, though not required in some states. Kel and his colleagues analyzed the requirement and stored all versions (the more stringent requirement) to satisify all scenarios by default. However, it is coded to allow inspectors to turn aspects on and off to be in compliance with local and state regulations. When asked what coding languages they primarily use, Kel shared they use Elixir for web development and Python for data science. They deploy their apps to Amazon Web Services.
All of Kel’s team at InspectionGo is remote, but many are West Virginians from cities like Elkins, Huntington, Morgantown, and more.
Several have completed degrees in Computer Science, but others have graduated with unrelated degrees or programming bootcamps. Several of Kel's employees prepared for their Coding career through learning at NewForce, a Coding training program operated by Generation West Virginia. that was based in Huntington, WV. It has moved to become a remote learning program. More information about NewForce is available at their website: https://generationwv.org/programs/newforce/.
Kel shared some thoughts on their hiring process:
Kel shared, “We look for people passionate about solving problems. It is helpful to learn who they [the candidate] are and what they are about. When given problems to solve it is important to analyze the problem and talk through possibilities. For our pair programming interview, we all work together on some code. The focus is not necessarily to find a a technology match, but to find out if the applicant is hands-on and how they work together to solve the problem.”
Kel finds joy in seeing people solve problems and is exceedingly optimistic about the development of technology careers in WV. Now, there is better access to startup capital to develop a technology business. The barrier to entry for technology has been lowered with access to multiple frameworks to help build software. There is no better time for a student in West Virginia to take advantage of technology career opportunities.
Kel's advice to students:
1. Don’t be afraid to try things. Trying and even failing is a step in learning! Fail often and move forward.
2. Seek out other people who also want to solve problems.
3. Keep your eyes on the prize!
4. Differentiate yourself - what you built and problems you solved, keep code you worked on, like on GitHub to be able to show code.
Kel welcomes internships InspectionGo and plans to grow that program.
Dan McElroy, President of the West Virginia Coding Club, "Kel is another amazing example of a West Virginian who has found a great coding career path and succeeded in staying in West Virginia while working remotely. Kel shows our students that they can also do this. Thank you Kel for your time and insights for our West Virginia Coding Club students."
Keep Coding!