Jesse Piascik
Founder, Software Engineer, and Product Manager in Louisville, Colorado
I've been coding and working with technology since 4th grade when I started developing adventure games in basic on my uncles apple II. You know, the choose your own adventure type. I soon became bored with that and moved on to making things move around the screen. I can still remember when my uncle showed me how to code a for loop. It was an ah ha moment. If you grew up when I did you know the drill. vic20, commodore 64, loading from tape and big floppies...
I stuck with it, but in college I was bored with the business classes that were required for MIS, so I decided to study archaeology. When I graduated in 95, I found it impossible to get a good paying job as Indiana Jones, so I went back to my love of coding and systems. I picked up some unix manuals and my brother who was in IT got me into an rs6000 dev box on a dial up connection. I quickly learned some unix and MUMPS and applied for a programming job at Healthways, an Aetna subsidiary. After spending a year and a half at Healthways coding reports and interfaces in MUMPS and Kermit, building a source management system and starting our intranet site with this new language called javascript, I decided I needed to move out west.
In 1998, I took a job with Sutter Health and picked up with my young family and moved west. It was at Sutter where I honed my javascript skills and learned a relatively new language called Java. This is when it really got fun. Apache Jetspeed had just been released and the servlet spec was like nirvana for coding to the http spec. It was a great gig, but in 2001 I started to get a little home sick so we picked up the family and moved closer to home.
Lands' End became my new home in 2003. After a couple years on the services side I moved over to the web development team. In 2009 I was promoted to development manager for landsend.com where I lead the development of B2C, B2B and international e-commerce sites. While in this role I found it pretty time consuming to keep track of 20 development resources and technical guidance on our project portfolio. This is when I started work on the project that would become imdone.