Kent wasn't one of those who wrote their first HTML page when they were three years old. He didn't think he would be a developer. He wanted to be a video editor!
Writing code for eight hours a day seemed like the worst thing ever to Kent. That is until Kent had a job where he had to take videos from a church's website and upload them onto their YouTube channel with all of the metadata. So Kent wrote a program that scraped the website, downloaded the videos, and uploaded them with the same title, keywords, and everything. It clicked for Kent that programming could be a tool and not just a chore.
Eventually, Kent got an internship, where he spent his time working on a Java program. Afterward, Kent got a job at Domo, initially for a Java position, but it wasn't long before moving on to the front-end JavaScript team. Then, Kent got an internship for USAA, where they were transitioning to a Java framework called Wicket. AngularJS was taking off, so Kent was worried he'd become irrelevant. So he spent his evenings trying to learn enough to keep himself relevant.
Kent was successful in keeping himself relevant and managed to get a full-time position at Domo. But, Kent was concerned that he wouldn't be able to grow at Domo since he felt that the team would only ever see him as an intern. So, Kent's next two job changes gave him increasing responsibility and seniority with each move.
It was around this time when Kent began to become interested in open-source. But, working a full-time job and then going home to work on open-source projects is incredibly draining. That was Kent's main draw to his next job at Paypal. They gave him the freedom to work on open-source during work hours. He also hosted workshops for Paypal's engineers.
Testing JavaScript was Kent's huge breakout. It gave an enormous amount of value to many people, which translated into earning more than half of his PayPal salary in the first month of its release! Kent was able to quit his job at Paypal and now works for himself full-time as an educator.
