Hello, I’m Jeff Savin, Staff Engineer for the WORK team. I have been at Varsity Tutors for 7.5 years now.

One thing that I've been working on most recently here at Varsity is something code named ORCas, which stands for optimized routing of calls, which I think is a really good name for it. In a nutshell, it plays to the strength of our sales workforce by breaking them into groups based on their expertise in certain subjects or product offerings. And that way we can route sales and customer calls to the best group of reps based on the information that we know about that call.

I have to say education is something every person in this world needs and being able to work on services that cater to that to help individuals maximize their education is pretty darn cool.

I love being a part of that. One of my favorite shirts that we received as employees here a while back is a shirt that says, “I Help People Learn” and that pretty much sums it all up.

Well, yeah. Actually, my mom owned a multi-level marketing company back in the day which took off and had a pretty complex payment schedule going down multiple levels. She had hired a programmer who built this whole payment solution in Basic and I loved looking at the code as he was trying to troubleshoot some of the issues and thought, wow, I could do this.

I've always loved puzzles and to me, programming seemed like a great big puzzle. So that's kind of how I got into it.

Well, the first language that I really learned, not counting basic, was COBOL. I know that dates me a bit.

I was going to college and at the time I was a data entry operator and we were entering data into forms on an HP mini computer. The data entry was part of a COBOL application and there came a time where the data that we needed didn't actually fit into the forms anymore.

The data had morphed into something different and so I piped up and said that I could make a change so that the data could be entered properly.

The company let me do that. And so from that day on, I became the sole computer programmer for the Los Angeles satellite office of Challenger Electrical Equipment.

What was the first thing that I coded or built?

I'm not sure if this was the first thing but one of the first big applications I built was using dBase 3. It was a frequent buyer tracking program for a marketing company that had Hunt-Wesson Foods as their client.

And one of the food brands for Hunt-Wesson was an ice cream topping brand that Dairy Queens used. So, the frequent buyer program then kept track of how many cases of these different flavors of toppings that all the Dairy Queens bought and they then earned points and redeemed them for various incentives.

That job was a lot of fun.

I remember I even got to go to a Dairy Queen convention in Hawaii where I set up a booth and brought up the point balances for the Dairy Queen owners as they visited the booth.

What's the next thing I plan on learning - that does not have to be tech related.

One of the things that has intrigued me for quite some time is beekeeping.

I would love to make my own honey or have bees that make honey.

And so I just recently watched some videos on that and I found out that it's a fairly extensive course, but I'm gonna possibly take that this fall so that by spring I can set up some hives.

We have so many things going on now. We have increased our product offerings, ten-fold from what we used to have many years ago. But what I really love now is that we're able to help whole school districts out at a time with one of our newer offerings called VT for Schools. I feel like this reaches so many kids that might not normally be able to get help with their education and has been one of the biggest impacts on education of anything that we've ever offered.

So I'm really, really excited about that.

IDE: pretty impartial, but I currently use Visual Studio code and that seems to work for everything I currently need.

Programming Language: Definitely Ruby, with Python being a close second. I just love the elegance of ruby.

Operating System: Mac OS only because I'm using it currently and I think it's better than Windows.

Keyboard Shortcut: SHIFT+CMD+4 If you don't know what that does, it will take a screenshot, which I do that all the time, so it comes in super handy.

Playlist/Genre/Artist: I love instrumental music. I love music of all kinds including many, many different genres. I think the one that I probably play the most is a playlist on Spotify that I curated, that probably has over 80 hours of music. I call it Instrumental Djent, which is a sub-genre of Progressive Metal. Various forms of Metal is probably the genre that I like the most.

Must have app: Probably Discord. There are some great communities on Discord that I'm a member of.

Game/Gaming: I love board games. I play a lot of board games on a platform called Board Game Arena, so I can't just name one game easily. I guess I'd say Welcome To is one of my favorite games at the moment.