dev_to_dev: Jacob Chapman

Bios

Ricardo Delgado

VueJS Frontend Developer

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ricardod_dev
Github: https://github.com/rdelga80
Dev.to: https://dev.to/rdelga80
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardo-delgado-6ab12a93
www: https://rdelgado-portfolio.web.app/

Jacob Chapman

Lead Kotlin Developer

Github: https://github.com/jacob-chapman
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-chapman-847a4097/

Ricardo: What was your hook into programming?

Jacob: When I was a little kid, I thought I was going to be an architect. I even wasted some birthday money on buying 3D modeling software that I thought was a game when I was like 10 or 12 for my computer. I just ended up building the worst houses imaginable.

Like a fancy Sim City.

Basically. The funny thing is I didn’t like Sims, I never played Sims.

But then my uncle killed my dreams and said, I had to be good at drawing to be an architect, which I don’t think is true anymore.

I forget how I came across it, but my high school offered a couple of classes for computer programming. I knew the gist of it, and I love building stuff.

It was kind of like Legos. I had so many Legos as a kid, that’s all I did. And so when I discovered programming it’s like cool, I can just build stuff.

I took programming classes in High School all the way to AP computer science and just went from there. I loved building, and I realized that being a software engineer meant you could build whatever you want, whenever you want without having to have massive amounts of resources — just a laptop. Which is wild, and it’s why I tell people, I think it’s the purest form of engineering because you’re not limited by really anything.

I say it’s one of the most tangible art forms I’ve ever come across. I used to write poetry, and you hope you can make people see in their heads what you’re putting into words and now it’s like, “no, no, I can literally make you see what I want you to see.”

It’s funny, one of the first things I did in my computer classes was build at Tic Tac Toe game in C++.

C++ was the first language I learned, which was so rough, because we had an older teacher. I was at a small Catholic high school, so there were not very many kids in this class learning C++ from a guy that was a theology teacher.

He wasn’t a programming teacher, but he had just been around so long that he know about it. So, yeah, we did a Tic Tac Toe game and I actually really enjoyed that in C++.

I would never recommend C++ for anybody to start out in but it’s what I did.

C++ has its benefits. It’s like you see the Matrix a little bit, working on all these different languages. You’re like “I’ve seen this before…” I don’t think it gets enough credit. It’s not the new sexy thing.

Yeah, I mean nobody wants to do that.

Now at PI, you were recently officially made the lead Kotlin developer.

Yeah, the Kotlin engineer now or multi-platform engineer. That’s what I do on a day-to-day basis.

And before that you were on an Android developer?

I was an Android engineer. And before that I was .Net engineer and C# engineer working with Xamarin, which is the cross-platform stuff from Microsoft.

And between them, how do you feel about Kotlin? Is it a natural progression of where you’ve been going with [your programming career] or did you see flaws in what you were working on? Or was it just an opportunity? Was there anything specific about Kotlin that grabbed you more than the other stuff?

Yeah, the language itself is so nice to work with. It’s so fluid — it’s a very modern language that’s still being worked on, it’s still in early iterations, but it’s so nice.

C# has lots of good asynchronous programming techniques. And then Kotlin is just so fluent. It’s such a nice language. There are so many cool things with it. Also, the multi-platform structure of it of it, work being compiled natively, is great and not just a hacky hybrid solution.

I think it was a natural progression for me from having started out of college in Xamarin, which was the C# cross-platform tool.

I was just lucky enough that Dima [Dmitriy Tarasevich, Engineering Manager] trusted me, and grateful how I was given the go ahead to try and explore this. And shoot, now it’s in production code.

To heap praise on our employer, that’s not something you typically find. Here it’s “do you have something? Can you offer something?” I’ve never felt like ideas get flatly shot down. I’m a throw spaghetti on the wall type of thinker, and there’s a lot of active listening within teams and discussions.

Is that your same experience? You said, I’m going to take this, I’m going to do this, and the response was, “yeah, this is yours. You want to do it? Let’s go for it.”

Yeah, for sure, the willingness to accept innovation and new ideas and discuss it was there from the get-go; and has been something that I’ve been super impressed with.

Even on that Android team, before I moved to multi-platform, we discussed making the architecture better. We would have long discussions about it, and it was always thoughtful which led to innovation. Then we kept reiterating over this and [the Android team is] still doing that now and everything’s a conversation and everybody’s listening.

So, it’s been great — it’s much different than previous jobs I’ve had where things were stricter and boxed. And I really appreciative that.

I always think the best programming comes when you think first. And it’s so funny to say it — since that’s not always the accepted method. It’s funny how at most jobs it’s just like “here’s your task, now go get your work done.”

And it’s not like we don’t want to ship code, I love shipping code, I think the great thing about this project with Kotlin is even though we’re doing a bit of an investment I can see across the horizon, and we’re going to ship stuff so fast.

It’s like if we bite this piece off in the start and do this initial investment then when we want to do another app, and scale our product up, we already have this infrastructure and now we can just scale. We can let other developers shine and move fast and innovate on their specific platforms without having to do this boiler plate because it’s already there for us to reuse.

That’s what I’m hoping; reduce that boilerplate, let others do what they do on their platforms, and excel at the best UI/UX, like, Swift UI, Android Jetpack Compose, and whatever’s going on in the JavaScript world with you guys — and just focus on making that stuff.

So last question, and this isn’t related to programming but are you a sports person? What sports are you into? And do you feel like that matters to work at a company like Barstool Sportsbook?

I am a sports person. Big sports fan.

I think it helps in certain cases. My previous job was for a sports entertainment company and that certainly helps me feel invested because I was a consumer, but I don’t think it’s necessary here, even though it also helps to have the background on it.

I think it’s 50/50, I don’t think you need to be fully invested in sports, and there’s some people that have been here that built this from the ground up, that aren’t fully invested in sports, and they still built a great product.

Especially since Casino is starting to become important, and everyone understands slots. But I think fundamentally what’s great about being a developer is that the field doesn’t necessarily matter that much, and you can be kind of agnostic. We think more about users and how people interact with apps, and how things look to people.

There’s always the challenge of having fresh eyes, right? We can never see Sportsbook from zero again, and so how can get back there? How can we remake a user’s experience and improve it?

Yeah, I certainly agree with that and even from the sports angle, I still, don’t know.

Especially the gambling terms, I still have trouble. I’ve been here seven months, and I don’t know what a Round Robin is.

It’s stuff like that, but as far as like seeing it with fresh eyes too, it’s funny because we did user testing and I was watching some of the user testing videos, and it’s like, “man, the button’s right there! Touch it!” But that’s why we do user testing because I look at this product all the time it’s like, “oh you go here and here and here.”

I always think of that TikTok video of the girl watching someone put different shaped pegs in the square hole. She gets more and more in pain like “no, no, no, stop doing it.”

Yeah, God bless people who do user testing because I would lose my mind.