Joe Stump on How Cycling and Travel Create Balance Outside Work

In Chapter 11 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, Joe Stump sets personal challenges to continuously plan and pursue new goals. He cycles to put himself to reflect and plan on what comes next. When traveling, he tries to read books set in his travel location to embrace the moment and more fully engage the experience away from home.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  How do you find quiet time to pause, reflect, and plan?

Joe Stump: I went through this awesome stage where I was reading novels in the places where they were set for a while. So, if I was traveling, I would pick a book…for instance, I ready Elvis Huckley’s “The Island” while I was in Thailand.  I read both Brave New World and 1984 in London.  I read Catcher in the Rye in New York.   …  So I’ve taken up reading. 

I also do long distance endurance sports.  I do a lot of cycling, running, swimming, and triathlons.  That kind of stuff.  I was talking to my dad about this the other day.  I feel that there is no better opponent on this planet than yourself.  When you are out playing a team sport like basketball or football or something like that, you have teammates that are goading you on. 

They are either cheering you or telling you that you need to pick up the slack and calling you out.  There is someone goading you on.  There’s coaches in other sports goading you on.  You know this, you run marathons.  When you are on mile 11 and don’t want to go to mile 12, the only person standing between mile 11 and 12 is yourself.   I really like that and a great by-product is the endorphin highs. 

Joe Stump on What Uncomfortable Tuk Tuk Rides Teach Us About Life

In Chapter 9 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, Internet entrepreneur and programmer Joe Stump parallels discomfort encountered in foreign travel experiences - "You don't get any more uncomfortable or challenged than in a Tuk Tuk in Bangkok" - with the uncertainty encountered in Internet programming. Both motivate him to build new experiences in life and career.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  How has your love and embrace of world travel affected your life perspective?

Joe Stump: I’m going to start out my answer with a quote.  One of my favorite all time quotes by Mark Twain is that “Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice, and narrow mindedness.”  So, I get out there….  It goes back to like “I like challenges.” That is why I’m in tech.  I dated an accountant for a very long time.  Accounting has not changed as a profession – before Sarbanes-Oxley – for 1000 years. 

I’m in a profession where the technology, the knowledge I learned two years ago is worthless today.  Absolutely worthless to me today. Travel appeals to me for that reason.  I like being uncomfortable and I like being challenged.  You don’t get any more uncomfortable and challenged than in a tuk tuk in Bangkok. 

Joe Stump on How to Improve Code and Build a Programming Career

In Chapter 8 of 16, Digg.com architect turned SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump shares advice for those seeking programming careers. First, Stump recommends openly putting one's work in the public domain so it can be seen, discussed, and refined. For programmers and coders, this means actively contributing to open source communities. Second, Stump advises following passion, not money or acclaim, as only cultivating passion leads to authentic purpose and fulfillment.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  What is your advice to college students, college graduates seeking programming jobs in the Internet space? 

Joe Stump:  I think that my advice for programmers, specifically, is to get involved in open source communities because that gives you exposure to a lot of people that are doing good work.  It also gets your code out there.  IT is almost like if you are an artist, you want people to see your art.  If you are a coder, you should want people to see your code. 

So, we actually, at Digg, almost all the people we hired were active in open source communities.  What also helps with that is open source communities bring together a couple different things:  One you have to code, so I get to look at your code ahead of time.  Also, here are a lot of mailing lists, IRC channels, and things like that so you can get a good sense of how people interact with other people and how people work.

The other thing, too, is that I always tell people when I went to college there were a lot of people getting into computers for all the wrong reasons.   Basically, they heard if I learn how to code, then I can make $85,000 a year immediately out of college, which is true…if you are good at coding.  Normally you are not good at things you don’t like.  Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this all the time where you need to do what you are passionate about – it doesn’t matter what it is but you need to do that - because you suck at everything else. 

It is so true.  If you think about it, when you are doing something you don’t like, you want to get it over with as soon as possible.  Whenever you are doing something you want to get over with as soon as possible, you are going to cut corners, you are going to be sloppy, you are doing anything you can… Think about painting the shed when you were a kid.  The worst paint job ever.  Do it because you love it. 

For instance, a lot of the girls that I have dated say: “I can’t believe you work all the time”.  I’m like “I do something that I am so passionate about it is not work.  Even if I was a pizza delivery guy, I would come home and code all night anyway because I can’t separate those two things.  A lot of people have very separate outlooks – there is my personal life and there is my job and they are separate.  That is not me at all.  They are all intertwined. I am a coder, there is no way around that.

Joe Stump on How Small Town Michigan Childhood Shapes Values

In Chapter 7 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, web entrepreneur Joe Stump reflects on how growing up in a small, Midwestern Michigan town shaped his values and sense of loyalty to friends, family, and colleagues.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  You spent the majority of your childhood and college growing up in Michigan.  How did that experience kind of contribute to the character and shape who you are today?

Joe Stump:  In Michigan, as you know, lots of good people.  Good, down home, regular folk.  The way things are there, you are brought up in the community to look after each other, take care of each other, support each other, that kind of thing. Everyone is closely connected.  The town where I grew up in was only 3,000 people. 

Everyone knew everyone else.  My parents went to school with everyone else’s parents.  There is a lot of history in that community.  Moving on from Michigan, the thing I notice about me that is different compared to friends that have grown up in the big city, there are core community values that maybe aren’t…

Erik Michielsen:  That speaks to your loyalty.  You are very loyal as a friend and also professionally. 

Joe Stump on How Art and Architecture Influences Shape Engineering Career

In Chapter 6 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump shares how his mom's love for art and dad's affinity for building and architecture shaped his career ambitions. Early on, Stump practices art and progressively takes liking to engineering - including practical experience working on cars, installing heaters, building houses - which teach structure, assembly, and design. Over time, he translates these experiences into computer programming and web architecture.  Stump is the co-founder and CTO at SimpleGeo (www.simplegeo.com), a San Francisco-based mobile location infrastructure services company.  Previously Stump was Lead Architect at Digg.  He programs in PHP, Python, Django and enjoys scaling websites.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems from Eastern Michigan University.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  You frame what you do as building virtual skyscrapers.  Your parents are both artists.  Your dad, specifically, is both a builder and an architect.  How did they influence your development?

Joe Stump:  My mom was a really good artist when she was younger and my dad was an architect and a builder as you said.  In many ways you end up being a composite view of your parents. So I was left-handed like my mom and we think very visually and stuff like that, so I ended up being really involved in art and what not.  My dad is total analytical engineer brain, so I got a lot of that working on cars, putting in heaters, and building houses with him and stuff. 

So, that is probably why I was drawn to coding, specifically.  Coding at the end of the day is a creative endeavor, but it allows me to flex both sides of my brain.  Obviously there is a lot of engineering involved, 1s and 0s and that kind of thing.  There is also a lot of creativity and artistry to what we do.  They’ve influenced me greatly, obviously. 

Joe Stump on How Short Projects and Fresh Starts Accelerate a Career

In Chapter 5 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, entrepreneur Joe Stump highlights how fresh starts keep him motivated, happy, and fulfilled. Stump looks for problem solving opportunities, addresses them, and then prefers to move onto the next challenge.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  How does embracing change play a role in both your personal and professional life?

Joe Stump:  I like new challenges.  I have this track record of working someplace for 2 ½ to 3 ½ years and then leaving.  I normally start each thing that I do with… I take that on because I see challenges.  Once I’ve kind of completed those or overcome those challenges it is time to move on. 

That’s generally how my career has been, a succession of climbing mountains.  And my personal life…  I was telling these guys earlier that I tend to like to move – just like I move from job to job every two to three years, I also move from city to city.  Within 2 ½ to 3 years you can be in a big city, you know all the cool little nooks and crannies and things like that. 

Once something becomes familiar to me, I’m bored with it and want to do something else.  So, I get to the top of one peak, I look and there is another one and I say, “That’s fun, let’s go to that.”  I’m not the guy who gets to the top of a peak and decides to start building a fort to solidify his fortress.  I’d rather move on.

Joe Stump on What Defines Success When Building Massive Websites

In Chapter 4 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, entrepreneur Joe Stump provides a practical view answering "What defines success in what you do?" by comparing internet architecture and programming to structural engineering. He concludes success means "Not breaking things."

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How do you define success in what you do?

Joe Stump:  Not breaking things.  At the end of the day, it is an engineering field.  How does an engineer describe success after he has built a bridge?  It didn’t fall down.  So, I mean at a core level, you do everything you can to not break stuff.

Joe Stump on How a One-Year Sabaatical Shapes College Education

In Chapter 3 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, Joe Stump leaves Eastern Michigan University to pursue a one-year sabbatical in Silicon Valley during the first Internet boom. There he builds hands-on programming and website architecture experience before returning to Eastern to finish his degree.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  This is 2000.  You are midway through your time at Eastern Michigan University and you popped out to take this opportunity and next thing you know you working, programming for a top 500 Media Metrix site.

Joe Stump:  It was pretty insane.  I went to collage.  I was on scholarship at Eastern and they have this awesome thing where you can take a one-year sabbatical.  I was looking at it as the worst-case scenario I get a year of experience and those were very lofty times. So, I went out there for a year and then paychecks became intermittent and so I ended up heading back.  Actually Care2 is still around and doing really well, and profitable.

Joe Stump on How Media Metrix Top 500 Developer Job Shapes Career

In Chapter 2 of 16, an early career mid-college job change enables Internet architect Joe Stump to push himself to failure while learning to build large scale websites - "Virtual Skyscrapers" - at Care2 during the 2000 dot-com boom. This one year experience understanding a Media Metrix top 500 website architecture builds confidence, Stump then applies in his post-college programming and development career.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen:  How did you make that transition from starting with looking at how to build a house or cabin, per se, to a virtual skyscraper.

Joe Stump:  The way it happened with me is trial by fire to be totally honest.

Erik Michielsen:  You burned a lot of houses.  There are no cabins left.

Joe Stump:  I’ve burned a few skyscrapers as well.  Basically what happened was that I got my first job in winter 1999, my first job doing programming.  It was for a fairly decent sized e-commerce site.  They sold laptops, stuff like that, but not a lot of traffic.  This was at the height of the dot-com boom and I was randomly perusing dice.com one day and I saw a job posting for a PHP programmer – PHP is the programming language I use – and it was like starting salary for between $80 and $100 thousand a year and I was like, holy crap. 

I applied and ended up going out to San Francisco during the dot-com boom and left college a year.  The site that hired me was a Media Metrix top 500 site.  They were doing 30-40 million page views per month.  They were the first ecard site on the internet.  It was total trial by fire.  My second job was working on one of the top 500 sites on the Internet. 

Joe Stump on How to Find Purpose Building Massive Websites

In Chapter 1 of 16 of his 2009 Capture Your Flag interview, Internet architect Joe Stump shares how building large websites - skyscrapers - has contributed to shaping his sense of purpose. Stump led social media site Digg's architecture team before departing to co-found location infrastructure company SimpleGeo.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What do you do?

Joe Stump: At my most basic level, I’m a computer programmer.  I specialize mostly in the architecture aspect. I like to think of it as like I build virtual skyscrapers.  The very big websites that you go to are virtual skyscrapers.  It takes a different mindset to build those sites than it does to say build a house or cabin.

How Cycling and Road Biking Provides Creative Escape - Caroline Giegerich

In Chapter 13 of 13, cycling offers digital media marketer Caroline Giegerich time to be creative and reflect while away from the computer and cell phone.

What is Appropriate Social Media Dinner Table Etiquette - Caroline Giegerich

In Chapter 12 of 13, Caroline Giegerich offers digerati iPhone etiquette tips to combat attention deficit disorder around Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook, and text messaging.

How to Manage Personal Blog While Working Full-Time Job - Caroline Giegerich

In Chapter 11 of 13, marketer and blogger Caroline Giegerich becomes stressed and time-constrained as her Daily Marauder blog responsibilities blossom while maintaining an HBO day job.  Ultimately, Giegerich finds balance by pausing content creation to gather reader feedback and reset her approach to the site. 

How Brown University Student Builds Confidence as Radio DJ - Caroline Giegerich

In Chapter 1 of 13, Brown University undergraduate Caroline Giegerich builds self-esteem and confidence as a DJ at Providence, Rhode Island's WBRU radio station. This foundation then provides plaform for her career in digital media sales, marketing, and bloging, including positions at the Los Angeles Times and Home Box Office (HBO).

How High School Diversity Shapes College Prep Planning - Phil McKenzie

In Chapter 7 of 13, Howard University, Duke MBA and Goldman Sachs alum Phil McKenzie recounts the in-depth multi-cultural and college preparatory experience - including majoring in architecture - attending Brooklyn Tech, one of New York City's specialized high schools. The experience enabled Phil to build upon his father's influence and study architecture in a diverse environment that contrasted with more homogeneous elementary and middle school settings.  Phil McKenzie graduated from Howard University and earned an MBA from the Duke University Fuqua School of Business.  Before starting FREE DMC and the Influencer Conference, McKenzie worked for eight years in sales and trading at Goldman Sachs.