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**Justin Garrison:** So you had posted on LinkedIn that you learned COBOL, having not been a developer, to go work at a toy factory, a toy distribution center. Can you explain some of that a little bit more to me? |
**David Beale:** Yeah, so I had definitely played with some code before. I came up in the late '90s. I'm about to be 39, and I got the internet in the summer of '98. So I came up in the late '90s, kind of getting into IRC and sort of the hackery side of the internet... It was all a little hackery back then. And so I pl... |
So when I had the opportunity to get this temp job at a toy distribution warehouse - and it was like AS400, sometimes you're going to have to like troubleshoot, write a little COBOL to fix bugs, stuff like that... I just dug into the internet, and figured out how to do it enough to get through the interview, and get th... |
**Justin Garrison:** And this was a temp job. You were learning how to code this stuff for a temp position at the company. |
**David Beale:** That is correct. At the time, I was living at my grandma's house, delivering pizza, playing in a couple bands, and my gear was just all wrecked, I didn't have any money... I wanted to get an apartment, move to a slightly bigger city... So this was the opportunity to like stack some cash for a couple mo... |
**Justin Garrison:** What did they use COBOL for in the mainframe floor at the factory? |
**David Beale:** It was a bunch of hand scanners. And to call it a mainframe was kind of -- I mean, it was running AS400, but it was not like a room, or anything. It was two small server racks. And yeah, these hand scanners for like order distribution, logistics, all that sort of stuff. And the entire warehouse pretty ... |
And so me and a couple other people were basically doing all the desktop support, networking, and then I was kind of the COBOL guy when it all sort of leveled out, because I had put the most time into it... So I was pretty much hacking on an AS400 like most of the time. |
**Justin Garrison:** What kind of stuff did you learn through that? What was the experience like as far as going through and "Hey, I have this expectation of what I'm going into", and then afterwards everything changes, obviously, once people demand things? |
**David Beale:** \[07:59\] You know, it demystified what life was like as a programmer a little bit. Obviously, I didn't want to be doing mainframe AS400 stuff. I was really interested in sort of modern, at the time, PHP, Java, stuff like that, and JavaScript. But it was really daunting to me... I had never really buil... |
**Justin Garrison:** I bet your bands had some pretty kick-ass MySpace pages. |
**Autumn Nash:** Right...? |
**David Beale:** You know, they did, but not thanks to me. I've got to give a shout-out to my good friend, Kyle Foundry, who is an incredible designer. He's gone on to have just an amazing career. And he made dope MySpace pages. |
**Autumn Nash:** I love that you were into something and then you found a job because you could do the amount of like prep before the interview, and get it... And then that your friend became this amazing designer. Because it's like, that's how you used to get in tech. You used to be like "Oh, this was my favorite thin... |
**David Beale:** Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's wild is how much COBOL is out there. It's still everywhere. Anything you do, with a Visa or MasterCard, anything you do on the stock market, a lot of healthcare... Everything flight-related is still on AS400 at its core. |
**Autumn Nash:** And military, and weapons and stuff... It's crazy. That's why when people say that they're going to get rid of Java, I'm like "Yeah, sure..." Because - I mean, there's so much COBOL out there... And can you imagine trying to migrate those systems that can't go down, and that are so intricate? |
**Justin Garrison:** When if someone comes up and says "You need 25 years of COBOL experience", you just raise your hand and you're like "Yes, I have done that." |
**Autumn Nash:** There are very few people your age in this market that have that. That's fire. |
**David Beale:** It's true. It's true. I have never used it since, to be completely honest; almost 20 years. |
**Justin Garrison:** The people who wrote the COBOL haven't either. |
**David Beale:** That's probably true. But yeah, if we go back too, the reason I ever wrote any code was skateboarding. So I've been skateboarding since 1996, and I don't remember learning to like ride a board. I'd always had one. But I got a pair of Etnies and like a nice board in '96, and a couple of videos. And I've... |
**Justin Garrison:** Because you had to disconnect, or someone would call and you would lose the download. |
**David Beale:** So what I would do is I would kick it off before I went to bed, and it would download for as long as my connection wouldn't time out. In the sticks of Virginia, late '90, \[unintelligible 00:11:21.26\] was the internet service provider, through the electric co-op. And it would time out usually every li... |
**Justin Garrison:** And this is why kids don't know patience today. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. I was like trying to explain that to my kids, and I was like "Do you know we had to wait for like cartoons to come on on Saturdays, and do you know how hard it was to download stuff on LimeWire and pirate music?" |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, even just the fact that there was an offline. Like, you had to choose to go on the internet... |
**Autumn Nash:** I was trying to explain dial-up to my children who die of WiFi. When our electricity goes out, I don't even think they care about the electricity. They care about the fact that WiFi doesn't work. Don't you miss the '90s internet? I had so many friends that I've met from random ways, and just... It was ... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[12:20\] I was not on '90s internet. I did not get the internet till 2000s. It was like \[unintelligible 00:12:23.28\] It was like my first internet. |
**David Beale:** Yeah, my father was super-supportive of my interest in technology. And it's really weird, because I try to think about what's the actual genesis... Like, when did I like first use a computer? And it's kind of like skateboarding, I have no idea. But I don't remember a time where I couldn't like run some... |
**Autumn Nash:** I don't remember the first time I had a computer, but I remember the first computer that was really mine, and I got one of those cool-colored iMacs... It was like a Teal iMac, and I swear that's like changed my entire life. |
**David Beale:** So jealous. I wanted one so bad. And my first computer was an HP Pavilion, 400 megahertz Celeron processor. |
**Autumn Nash:** HP's used to be fire back in the day, though. Those were like -- |
**David Beale:** I believe it had 64 megabytes of RAM, and a 25-gigabyte hard drive. |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, that's big. You'd never need more space than that. |
**Autumn Nash:** But it's so crazy... iPhones have -- |
**Justin Garrison:** The new iPhone's coming out, they're like "Oh, the pro comes with 256 gigs." I'm like "That's not enough." |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm like, "That's not even enough for the kid pictures I have on my phone." |
**Justin Garrison:** I remember -- because I got my first skateboard in '89, and I remember, because I found it like walking out in a field, and it was like in a bush. I'm like "This is amazing. Someone left a skateboard here." And it was like a Ninja Turtle skateboard... |
**David Beale:** Oh, nice. |
**Justin Garrison:** And I was like "This is great." So that was my first skateboard. I had been skateboarding all through the '90s, I wasn't on the internet. We built a quarter pipe in my front yard, and a fun box, and some rails and stuff like that... And I used to have so much fun doing that. And then the internet c... |
**Autumn Nash:** People always say that kids need to go outside, but I feel like we are -- this just shows \[unintelligible 00:14:08.00\] the internet because of skateboarding and a band... So what now? Like, boomers... |
**David Beale:** Yeah. And skateboarding got me into music, too. All of it. It's all because of skateboarding, actually, which is crazy. But yeah, that was the very beginning of like ever writing any code, or doing anything like that. And then I didn't go to college... I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional home, didn't r... |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, so explain the progression here from you got this temp job, you're doing some COBOL, you're learning a bunch of stuff, you're doing networking, which especially early-ish 2000s was kind of the Wild West... Like, yes, finally, everyone's on Ethernet. This is a pretty stable \[unintelligible 00... |
**Autumn Nash:** Also, networking is hard. That is hard to learn. |
**David Beale:** Yeah. So I learned networking through my high school. I had crappy Windows 3.1 computers, and we had a couple of computer classes, two typing classes, and then programming class that was computer math science, and it was just working through Visual Basic 101. QBasic for the first class, and then Visual... |
\[15:52\] So I just learned enough about networking, and learned how to use -- I forget what I used, but the Windows equivalent to like traceroute and ping and stuff like that, to figure out what the internet gateway was, and how to access it from one of the terminals... Or they weren't terminals, but one of the typing... |
**Justin Garrison:** This was, again late '90s... How were you finding this information? The Internet was difficult. You didn't have a smartphone, you didn't have a way to -- there was books, right? There's like books and magazines, and then friends. |
**David Beale:** Well, I had Internet at home. So I graduated high school in 2004. So this was like early 2000s, and I had Internet at home. So what I would do is I would literally write down commands in my notebook of things to try... Because I could get a DOS prompt, and then I'd just try stuff. And so I'd write down... |
**Justin Garrison:** Again, the patience... The determination and patience was just -- |
**David Beale:** I mean, we were all playing Pac-Man on our TI-83s and stuff like that, too. It was it was a lot of fun using technology back then, because you actually had to make it yourself a little bit more. |
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