About

I am Scott Watermasysk. This is my personal site of things I find interesting and valuable. I have been working (and founding) start-ups for the last 20+ years.

My core tech stack these days is Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript, but I also spent 10+ years working with ASP.NET and C#.

Outside of work, I’m a proud husband and father to two extraordinary daughters.

Interests

• Even 20+ years in, I still enjoy learning new ways to build products and bring ideas to life.
• Big fan of the Sixers and Eagles.
• Love typing on and building custom mechanical keyboards
• Enjoy training and eating right more than most people. I have been digging into longevity and how exercise and diet can play a leading role.

Current Projects

• Kickofflabs - KickoffLabs is a platform for growing your audience with giveaways and contests.
• PhrontPage - A newish open source blogging application
• ThocStock - A listing of the best in-stock mechanical keyboards parts
• HowIVSCode - The easy answer to the question, “How are you using Visual Studio Code?”

A Summary of My Career

• I spent my first 4+ years working at Consumer Health Sciences and KPGM. At CHS, I worked on the consumer side of Pharmaceutical research. At KPMG, I worked in the internal strategy group. While at both, I got back into programming (something I had done as a kid).
• I eventually made my way to a group called Innovative Health Solutions (part of Besler at the time). There, I had my first real software job, working on various products in the medical billing space.
  While at IHS, I was bitten by the blogging bug and built what I believed was the first ASP.Net blogging app. This app eventually became Text and was the first open-source project I ever worked on (although, at the time, I did not fully grasp the open-source concept).
  -.Text was a great creative outlet and led to the creation of DotNetWeblogs. DotWebWeblogs grew like crazy and was eventually spun into weblogs.asp.net, allowing Microsoft to cover the hosting costs (silly me, I should have just sold ads, but oh well).
• Through weblogs.asp.net and other community activities (ASP.Net MVP program, Insiders, etc.) I met Rob Howard, and at some point, he told me about an idea he had for a new product called Community Server. This would allow me to work on.Text (and more) full-time. I jumped at the chance and joined Telligent Systems in 2004.
  I spent seven years at Telligent working on Community Server and related projects, holding titles from Sr. Developer to VP of Architecture. Looking back now, I had various reasons to leave Telligent, but in the end, I just wanted to try building a company on my own.
• 2011 I left Telligent and started working on a new KickoffLabs. KickoffLabs is a marketing platform that grows an audience using viral giveaways.
• 2025 - Working with a team building an application to service medical coder schedule and resource allocation. The application is a new Ruby on Rails application using a custom event sourcing system.

Technology Summary

• I was lucky enough to grow up in the 80s with a computer in my home. Our school library had various computer magazines, and I would spend way too much time copying various basic programs into the computer. It started with a TI-99, and an HP followed.
• At some point, I naively decided basketball was more important than computers, and I took a break from programming until after college.
  At my first job out of college (CHS), I quickly learned that I could not out-research the Ph. D.s I was working with. However, I could use some basic programming background to automate some of the more mundane tasks and eventually process data faster than they could. One of the other researchers at CHS pointed me to Visual Basic, which ultimately led to ASP.
• I was starting to get “dangerous” with ASP and eventually found ASP.Net (well, ASP+ at the time). I decided it was a chance to get in on the ground floor of something new and jumped in with both feet.
  I spent the next 10+ years working with ASP.Net and C#. I was lucky to be part of the Microsoft MVP program, to be recognized as a Microsoft Regional Director, and to meet many great people because of .NET, and I am still very thankful.
• When it was time to start KickoffLabs, I needed a technology change. There was absolutely nothing wrong with .NET, and we could have built the same product with it, but I wanted to try something new. I dabbled with Ruby and Rails for a few years and decided to go all in. I have not looked back since.

• These days, I use mostly Ruby and Rails, with some JavaScript via Stimulus/Hotwire.
• On the database side, while I spent many years working with SQL Server, it has been all Postgres and Redis for much of the last 10+ years. It is hard to see a world without using either of these daily.
• Rails with Turbo has been good for me, but I have been experimenting with Inertia.js (React) and this increasing feels like right mix of productivity and user experience.