Team Video: Robert Passafaro, Wiley Debs and Andie Pha
Team Video is made up of three self-proclaimed mediaphiles. Wiley Debs, Andie Pha and Robert Passafaro decided to build an automated video transcoder with Zenko Backbeat and the HandBreak open source video transcoder. At upload, the Video team’s application will transcode video into all of the required formats for consumption from multiple devices.
Wiley learned about 42 through a cyberpunk blog, NODE. He’d been to college and done general coursework, but was out in the workforce, and not finding his ideal work. After a couple of less than satisfying sales and customer service jobs, he decided that he wanted to do something else, and programming seemed interesting. He heard about 42, and traveled to Northern California from the Tampa Bay area to give it a try. Soon to finish his first year, he’s really enjoying the program and looking forward to finding an internship soon.
Andie must be tired of rocket scientist jokes, but if the shoe fits… He has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Cal Poly Pomona, and worked for an aerospace manufacturing company in Los Angeles before he came to 42. He learned about 42 through Facebook. He wasn’t specifically drawn to programming, but saw it as a chance to try something new. His teammate Robert says that Andie that he tells them all the time, “I don’t computer, I can code, though.”
Robert is from Northern New Jersey, where he went to community college and earned a certificate degree, but credits the work he did growing a small company’s web commerce business with fueling his interest in programming; he used a little bit of C++ in his website work. After three years, that website work paid off, in a big way. He grew their web commerce business 16-fold.
