This is the third in a series of Venmo Developer Spotlights, where you can get insights on what life at Venmo is really like. If these posts tickle your fancy, head over to our job board and join us!

Joel is a solid backend engineer at Venmo. Joel grew up in Iowa believing his dream job was on the West Coast. After graduating at Iowa State University with a degree in Computer Science, he went the East Coast. In his free time, he enjoys testing new web frameworks and going outside for some fresh air!

How long have you been with Venmo? What do you work on?

I have worked at Venmo for seven months. I am currently on the Scaling team, which helps Venmo’s code keep working as we grow with our user base. I have worked on projects that setup Celery for queue processing, migrated data from MySQL to Redis for extremely fast reads and writes, and also work in Puppet, our infastructure manager for deploying and managing our services.

What is your favorite programming language?

I enjoy many programming languages, but I can’t seem to pick just one. Python and Javascript would definitely be in my favorite programming languages. Both are very informal and have many ways of doing the same thing. I believe this freedom gives them a personality. A personality made of common practices, clever tricks, and some ugly stuff too.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I try to stay active and go to the gym as much as I can. In the Fall, a group of coworkers and I participated in ZogSports dodgeball, which was extremely fun! I definitely plan to join another season of it soon! When I’m at home, I like to investigate new programming languages, frameworks, and software for my own projects.

Are you working on any side projects right now?

I am currently working on a mobile app for skydivers. Skydivers are required to do a lot of jump logging in order to become licensed and it requires a lot of manual labors. With new technology in cell phones, almost all data can be collected automatically.

What is a fun fact about you that you don’t usually get to talk about?

When I was little I took dance classes with my sisters. I took lead roles in many nursery rhymes as a cowboy, a mouse, and a spider.

What advice do you have for aspiring developers?

Learn as much as you can! There are unlimited applications of software development and you can decide how you want to apply it. Pick something that interests you and learn that front to back. The more you know, the more experience you will have to make an educated decision.

Got more questions? Email us at blog@venmo.com!