Kevin Urrutia is a programmer and entrepreneur based in Manhattan, New York. He has held a number of product development roles at software companies and startups including Mint, Zaarly as well as leading up his own web and app consulting firm OneTinyBit. Currently, he applies his programming knowledge to his own entrepreneurial endeavors including a new outdoor adventuring company, Montem and an on-demand home cleaning service in NYC called MaidSailors.
Reach Kevin via twitter and Github @danest.
How did you first learn about programming?
I started programming when I was in middle school or high school. I was playing this web-based game MMORPG called Secrets of War, which was a completely text-based game for the computer. I thought it was very cool. There were tons of users. I thought I’d like to learn how to make something like it. From there I purchased a C++ programming book on how to make games. That, however ended up being way over my head at that time. I was maybe 13 or 14 and was like, ‘What the hell is C++?’ You had to learn processors and compilers. It looked cool but it was way too complicated for me at that age.
I stopped on C++ and game development but I was still really interested in computers so I got into Photoshop and graphic design. That’s actually when I really started learning about computers because I learned how to download and install all this software. Sometimes it was figuring out how to install software I would get for free… (laughs). That’s when I learned how to learn online, which is really a main skill for learning how to program — learning online. So, I did a lot of Photoshop. I had a lot of fun creating form signatures with that. When you’re playing a game you may want a form signature for you own handle or username. I made a ton of those for people and had fun doing that.
What ultimately pushed you to pursue programming as a profession?
Prior to college and even in college I didn’t know I wanted to be a programmer. The first year of college I didn’t do programming at all. I went to Queens College and took general classes. My second year I went to SUNY Binghamton and decided I wanted to do programming. I think it was because a friend of mine said, ‘Oh you do computer stuff. I think you’d like programming.’ I really did love computers, so it made sense. That’s when I really began learning what programming meant and what it is.
Once I began studying it I got exposed to things like TechCrunch and Hacker News and started seeing people building cool shit. There were all of these startups becoming really successful. That’s where I got more into programming as a real profession. But the stuff I was learning in school was really more computer science-focused. You were learning your algorithms and your math equations. What I was seeing online though with all of these startups was web development. I think when a lot of people think of programming now, that’s what they think of when they say, ‘Oh I want to be a programmer.’ They think of app development and website development, HTML, CSS. That’s what I wanted to do too. It looked like more fun versus command line programming that we were taught in school. I always thought it was kind of weird that people thought that was fun. I wanted to do more user experience-focused work, because remember I was still interested in graphic design from when I was younger playing with Photoshop.
When I found out you can do both programming and the graphic design stuff that’s when things really clicked for me. I spent so much time learning tutorials. I would do what was called NetTuts back in the day and PSDTuts. These were websites that taught you how to do anything. How to make a simple jQuery plugin. How to make a simple website. It was stuff like that.
What were some of the biggest hurdles you faced early on?
I think the biggest hurdle is that there are just a lot of programming languages to learn. As a beginner this is overwhelming because you think you need to pick the right one. I thought, ‘Oh my God I need to learn Java. I need to be an expert in Java.’ That’s what everyone was doing. Then you’re reading about all these tech guys and startups and all they’re doing is PHP because Facebook blew up. So now you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God I’ve gotta learn PHP!’ Then you read Ruby on Rails is blowing up and you’ve got to learn that.
You get overwhelmed in the beginning by all these languages and the concern about picking the right one to be able to get a job. It’s tough to figure out what you want to do. In the end you realize the language doesn’t matter because the concepts remain the same. It’s just a way to write code. That’s one of the biggest things I’ve taken away. A lot of the languages are very similar and yes they have their differences but ultimately they do the same thing and it comes down to preference. You pick one and try to master it the best you can and you pick up the core ones you need as you need them.
What are the major influences that have affected your programming
The biggest thing for me was seeing these startups getting big. There wasn’t one major influence in particular but seeing all of this success I realized I wanted to be able to create something myself. It pushed me to learn more programming so I could do the full coding aspect of starting a website back to front and not needing to rely on anyone else technically aside from design.
What are some important lessons you’ve learned through projects or products you’ve worked on?
Of the best projects I’ve worked on that taught me important things, the one I need to start with is an early project from when I was in college. I worked with my friend Wilson Lin. It was this website called Madeline Rosa. It was an on-demand flower startup (laughs). The site was really simple to build. We designed and built it in a week or two. But the big lesson we took away from that was, you can have a website and an idea, but it doesn’t matter if no one ever visits. So we realized in addition to programming you also need to do marketing.
Other product experiences where I learned a lot was working at Mint and then Zaarly. Mint was completely different from what I experienced in college. In college you did everything by yourself or maybe with one other person. Working at Mint though, this was a huge code base with 20 or 30 developers touching it. That’s where I learned about programming disciplines like working as a team, making sure features get done completely and even planning your day out around meetings. It made me think about programming as a whole versus just putting together a little website no one uses. With Mint the changes you make affect hundreds of thousands of people who are on the website. That’s where team building and planning becomes really important. In school or college you don’t learn how to code as a team because you’re expected to do everything yourself. At these companies, if you don’t know how to do something you’re expected to utilize the knowledge of your team to get the job done. It’s a mind shift.
At Zaarly it was a smaller company, which was nicer for me. We had more control and ownership of the product and worked on smaller teams. I primarily worked with my roommate and a designer. One of the big things we worked on was the booking flow, which was where new customers would book the service they wanted. This was a really cool experience because that’s where I learned about the Checkout process and user testing. We had a guy whose main job would be to look at analytics to understand where people dropped off in the process. That got me thinking more about marketing again. This was another mind shift for me from being strictly a programmer building something and not necessarily thinking about the marketing aspect.
How has you focus or outlook evolved over time?
As I’ve been hinting marketing has become a big focus for me and that started at Zaarly, where I was the programmer on the marketing team. The team was three people who were purely marketers. They needed help with the technical aspect of installing code and tracking users. We used a tool called Sailthru that was an early retargeting tool. It essentially tracked what the user was looking at during the session so you could follow up with a targeted email with those specific products they were reviewing. I focused on that as well as the emails that would go out to follow up, so really the more technical side of the marketing, not as much the strategic side.
This work was interesting to me because it got people back to the website. Thinking back to Madeline Rosa, having the issue early on of actually getting people to the site had a big impact on my interests. It continues to have a big impact. This marketing interest has really stayed with me since then. I started exploring what kind of SEO work we did at Zaarly. It turned out we did some, but not as much as we could have. I was constantly reading Moz and other SEO blogs and saw some small tweaks we could make to increase our user base, which was a big focus for the company at that time. I realized there was a lot of technical SEO tactics people don’t typically do because traditional marketers don’t know how to really edit a website. That was exciting to me and continues to be because it’s got direct business impact that I can do myself. I get to be the programmer making those changes.
What are you most excited about learning next?
From a marketing standpoint I am most excited to learn about Facebook ads. I’ve been doing a lot of SEO lately but still want to learn more about paid advertising. I’m doing some courses on how to set up your ads and copywriting, which is something I’m not very good at. I’m excited to learn how to improve at this.
On the programming side, the recently released messenger bots by Facebook is going to be big. So that will be good to learn how to do. I think it’s going to be similar to when iPhone apps came out. People were able to make a lot of money doing apps, which you look at now as being very mature, but when they started were very simple. I think that will hold true for these messenger apps as well.
What changes in programming might we see in the next 3 to 5 years?
One of the biggest changes I see now is computer-assisted programming. Right now we have pair-programming with your buddy or your co-worker. It’s helpful. You have someone there with you watching you code and helping you think through the problem. You have someone to check your spelling! One little misspelling will cause your program to crash, so having someone there to watch you is big. What’s going to be huge is having a computer reading your code as you type instead of a person and telling you where your logic is wrong. This opens up human capital for your partner to be programming instead of watching you.
What advice about programming would you give your younger self?
I would say pick one language and learn it the best you can. Contribute the most you can by working on projects in that language because I think that’s the best way to learn. You can read books sure, but you do a couple of projects and start to see why your code is working or isn’t working or even just replicate another application out there like Twitter or Facebook. That’s a great way to learn everything you will want to know in a language that you pick. In the end the language you pick doesn’t matter. If you learn it, you’ll be able to do what you want to do.
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