30 - Garrett Krohn

Nov 20, 2023

Garrett Krohn is a Software Engineer working at Kipsu, a mature start-up in the Twin Cities. Before embarking on the software career path, he pursued a career as a professional musician. he earned his Doctorate of Musical Arts in 2021 and has had some really cool opportunities to play in some incredible music groups like the Detroit Opera Orchestra. He had the end goal of teaching at a University full-time, but a number of things changed that, including starting a family. He has two sons who are 2.5 and 5 months old, and moving around the country for college jobs just wasn't worth it. After a long process, he decided to do a Bootcamp and get into software engineering and he has loved it ever since. he really enjoyed working in the startup space where everything moves quickly and there is always something new to learn.

Neovim and Terminal

His progression through IDEs has been interesting. For Bootcamp, he was required to use Netbeans, which worked but felt a bit clunky. Once he started at Kipsu he used VSCode primarily until he began to do more backend work, which required coding in PHP, so he switched to PHPStorm. He had a couple of co-workers who use terminal-based IDEs and he was curious about it. He went from someone who hated the Vim tutorial he was required to complete to someone who got obsessed with building his own configs. Tweaking and setting up his workflow to one that doesn't use the mouse and allows for peak efficiency became his obsession. he really enjoyed sharing what he learned with co-workers and friends, so he started a technical blog to write about Neovim and his workflow at garrettkrohn.com.

Outside of work, he loves to spend time with his family, follow baseball and football, play chess, and play soccer. He also runs a kids’ YouTube channel, Ivan the Inspector, with his friend. It has really blown up and they have 2.7 million views on the channel! If you have kids under 8 check it out.