Hack Club AMA w/ Guillermo Rauch: Full Interview

so grateful to have you join us today I'm gonna lock Boone who's gonna be running this call but thanks again for being here thank you for having it thanks too much that um oh yeah first I just want to thank everybody who is here who joined all the high club students who joined and everybody who's watching the live stream my name is Lachlan Campbell I'm at Lachlan JC I'm 18 and I miss had the head of storytelling here at hat Club it is honestly such an honor to have Guillermo here today I have looked up to him for years and so it be able to host this conversation is just

pretty remarkable so karamo yeah I guess I'll let you kind of introduce yourself but I we're gonna spend the first like ten minutes of this just having a conversation the two of us and then we'll open it up to questions from everybody you're awesome yeah thanks for having me everybody it's especially nice to have this opportunity amid the coroner virus crisis and kind

of be able to test out this new way of connecting with people online and live streaming so I'm really excited yeah so my background is in engineering I've always been a contributor to the open-source community I started way back in the day getting busy with PHP development that started contributing to open source to some early PHP projects before that kind of

my door to the software development world was very much open source as well with Linux I always attribute Linux to being one of the things that kind of launched me into this world of open source and contributing to projects and learning how to use computers quite deeply we had a Windows machine at home but I would get really busy with try to compile my own Linux kernels and the

Linux from a scratch project and so on but one of the things that kind of define my career early on was I noticed that with all the open source things that I was doing the web was this fascinating medium for me and I noticed that the web was becoming more dynamic I started doing some odd jobs online and was starting to gravitate very strongly with not so much that I PHP as a back-end language would also what PHP could do when you would combine it with JavaScript running on the client side and the web kind of becoming a live and

starting to do lots of fascinating things like real-time communication so I started contributing to a project called mootools it was one of the biggest javascript libraries at the time competitor to jQuery and sometimes Muto's ended up being quite remarkable because it was kind of the framework of choice of a lot of quite influential projects notably it inspired a lot of the early investments into JavaScript at

Facebook but also projects like Joomla and lots of other open source CMS's we're starting to take Muto's as a dependency and what's remarkable about this historia thinking I was looking back is that I think I became an open an official open-source contributor in this project when I was 15 or 16 that was kind of like the opportunity for me to rise to more notoriety online and I'd

say Who I am and put my face on about pages of this projects and then my career kind of started with this interest deep interest in making things very dynamic interactive animated one of my big early contributions was a thing that went viral all over the internet before reddit was kind of dominant in the social media file and link sharing space digg.com was a big thing and getting to the front