Summary: <br> Joel is an MIT Educated, family first workaholic. Joel loves his k9 friends Ted, Teddy and Bently has a beautiful wife Michelle. Recently Joel has welcomed a brand new addition to the family, his first child, a daughter, Ari. Joel has a passion for writing clean object oriented code with a heavy emphasis on services. Single Responsibility Principle, Low Coupling and High Cohesion are just a few of the important design principles he employs.<br> <br> <br> Transcript<br> Jon Ash: Before we get started would you tell us a little bit of backstory about yourself? How you got started, and what motivates you?<br> <br> Joel Beasley: Yeah, for sure. My father was an engineer, he came out of the Air force. He was putting the GPS systems into the B32 stealth bombers in the 80s. So that's how he got his education. Then he came out of the Air force, started doing freelance work. And then my mom had two other kids. We have three kids. And she said, "Take this one with you to work, so he doesn't cause any trouble here at the house." So my dad would take me to work with him and give me smalls tasks to keep me busy. And later I realized he was just trying to buy himself time to get work done by having me go chase down items, and memory, and things like that, and solder different parts together.<br> <br> Joel Beasley: So from there I got really into technology, wrote code all the way up through high school. After high school had some successful projects in the real estate space, and fitness, and then in accounting, and personal financial management. Met some investors, started seeing other people make the same mistakes I was, so I started sharing with them. But there wasn't enough time for me to share all my advice, so I learned about blogging. Well I know about blogging, but I learned about, you write when you can't tell everyone everything all the time.<br> <br> Joel Beasley: So you can just say, "Hey, take these collections of writings if you need them, here you go." So that turned into a blog which turned into a book. From the book I wanted to make sure I would get flamed publishing nonsense, so I started sending copies of it to different CTOs. And from friends, past people I had acquaintance with, and then some just popular CTOs. And they started to write back and we ended up having these phone calls. And that turned into recordings of the phone calls to share on a mailing list.<br> <br> Joel Beasley: And then someone was like, "Hey idiot, it's called a podcast. Stop sending me MP3s of your conversations." That's when I learned that a podcast was more than just an app on the iPhone. And we started a podcast, and then it grew really fast. Now we're just sharing and helping people everyday. I like it.<br> <br> John Callaway: So the initial project and book was modern CTO. You want to tell us a little bit more about that?<br> <br> Joel Beasley: Yeah. Those conversations, there was about 12 recurring conversations. Please don't quiz me on them now. One a big one was like, spaghetti code MVP epidemic. Everybody was writing some really bad spaghetti code. And they were making the excuse of, "Oh, it's an MVP, I can write really bad spaghetti code." I said, "There's only two reasons why you write bad code, either you know how to write good code and you choose to write bad code, or you just don't know how to write good code."<br> <br> Joel Beasley: And both of those things suck because they're both fixable, right? You can learn how to write good code, and then just reduce the scope. And then have a moderately quality base that's not spaghetti code crazy. And obviously there's a spectrum of spaghetti code too. But like, Ben Orenstein's spaghetti code's a lot different than a first time engineer.<br> <br> John Callaway: I saw you tweet out that particular quote ... or someone else had tweeted out that code and at...
