Ben is joined by Matt Trask to discuss his path in to tech, why community matters more than code, personal finance, cycling, and Star Wars.

Matt is a Senior Software Architect, Podcaster, API aficionado, and Cycling addict.

Links - 

• Civ5
• RollerCoaster Tycoon
• Listen Money Matters podcast
• Mad Fientist
• The Soul of America by Jon Meacham
• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

Transcript -
Ben:
Hey, welcome to this episode of the More Than Code podcast. I'm really excited to have my good friend and co-host of the PHP Town Hall podcast with me today, Matthew Trask. How's it going, Matt?

Matt:
Hey, I'm good. How are you doing?

Ben:
Good, man. You are getting ready for Christmas. Is there Christmas music blaring?

Matt:
I mean, I guess because it's 2020, I'm having the hardest time getting into the whole Christmas spirit. I remember last year we went to... There's a band, JD McPherson. They did a whole Christmas bluesy rock concert. It was just perfect. I mean, there's nothing this year. I'm struggling to be in Christmas mood.

Ben:
Wow, that's pretty sad, because usually, Labor Day rolls around and you start the Christmas music.

Matt:
I started July this year, because it's 2020. The rules don't matter. But even going out to Target just is hard. Yeah, it's 2020. I'm sure once Christmas gets here, it will be cool. But even Christmas music can't bring me to the mood.

Ben:
Man, all right. So, tell us a bit about yourself for those who don't know you. Where did you grow up?

Matt:
Yeah. So, I grew up in Atlanta and I call Atlanta home, but I was actually born in Germany in a little town called Fulda. Back when I was born, there's East and West Germany. So, Fulda was in the west side. It's an American military base. Some dude... Back when I was working in a restaurant, I had that city on my name tag or whatever. He told me about there's a mountain range that runs North to South in Germany. The South of Fulda is called the Fulda Gap. Had anything happened, that was like the place tanks from either side would have rushed through. So, we're on a pretty, busy popular army base for the first couple years of my life. And then I jumped around at Kentucky, Atlanta. Now, I'm in Nashville, but I call Atlanta home for all intents and purposes.

Ben:
Nice. What brought you to Nashville?

Matt:
Well, I mean, a company by Jacques Woodcock, who's old, old, old friend of PHP Town Hall and old PHP community member. I was working at a startup with him living in Atlanta, working remotely back about four or five years ago. And then when that startup failed, he did his best to find all five of us jobs. It just so happened that the place that wanted to hire me was in Nashville. They needed me to move to Nashville. I really didn't have anything going on. I don't have a family or anything like that. So, I packed up, moved up here. It's been that way now for five-ish years.

Ben:
Do you plan to stay in Nashville?

Matt:
That's a conversation my girlfriend, Kieran and I have almost maybe once a month or so. We don't really know. My family's in Atlanta and South Carolina, my immediate family. Whereas her family is mostly on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So, nothing's really tying us in Nashville. Her job is here, but she's also been doing it remotely for the last 8, 9, 10 months, how long it's been and has run into no problems whatsoever. So, we've thrown out moving to Minneapolis and Twin Cities. That puts us within a twoish-hour car ride to her family. Moving back to Atlanta, which puts us closer to my family.

Ben:
It's still a two-hour car ride.

Matt:
Do what?

Ben:
Still a two-hour car ride.

Matt:
I mean, yeah, it is. That's perfect. I'm just close enough that I can see my family if I wanted to, but it is such a pain to drive in Atlanta that, yeah, it's a perfect barrier to that. So, I mean, we thought about Atlanta, because what she does from work, there's a lot of opportunities out there too. So, we don't know. We're here until at least August of 2021. So, we'll have to make a decision at some point.

Ben:
So, I'm interrupting you from hitting your mileage goal. Tell us what the goal is and how your progress.

Matt:
I mean, not really interrupting me. I didn't start and then stop or anything, but my mileage goal this year was 2,500 miles cycling. I decided that if I reach that goal, the possibility of getting a new bike can be realized. I don't need any bike, but my bike got 6,000 miles on it. It's a good bike, but it'd be nice to have a bike just to hop on and ride around and then want to do deal the whole shoes, gadgets, that kind of thing. I'm sitting at 2,314 miles. We figured out that if I do 14 miles a day through the end of the year, I'll hit the goal. So, it's the Friday before Christmas, not a lot going on, quiet. So, I figured I would hop on and do it now, instead later tonight.

Ben:
Good plan. Are you more of the road biker? Do you ride at home, any of that?

Matt:
So, I mean, at home, I have that smart trainer. I can do a program called Swift, which is it's like a virtual reality world that with the trainer on Bluetooth, it acts like I'm riding on the road. But during the summer and when it's not 38 degrees outside, I'm usually out on the road somewhere. Mountain bike scares me. I know, Eric Barnes and some other people do mountain biking and it's super cool, but I'm afraid that one jump and I would break my neck or something. I don't really like to take a risk just getting hit by a car versus making a bad jump. Actually, getting hit by a car is way more likely to happen, but I also figured if I get hit by a car, an ambulance can get to me really fast. I don't know that works out logically. But in my head, it makes perfect sense.

Ben:
I was like the car might hurt a little more too.

Matt:
Yeah, probably. Yeah. There's a thing in Nevada, some dude was driving a truck. He was high on meth. He ran into a group of cyclists and killed eight of them and injured another five. I was just like, "Well, that could totally happen." Yeah. I mean, Nashville is cool in that we have a ton of greenways that are very loosely connected. So, I have a little bit of road to ride on and then I can hop on a greenway. And then barring someone is just being really dumb and getting their car onto the greenway, which does happen like maintenance and things like that. But barring someone, just being dumb and driving their car on the greenway, I can be remotely safe.

Ben:
Good plan. Alright, so tell us a bit. What got you into tech?

Matt:
Man, I got into tech because I needed health insurance. I'm just going to be super honest. I have a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. I've had it since I was born. In order to stay alive, I have to take steroids daily. So, before I was doing tech, I was trying to make it as a musician. I went to music school. I was teaching guitar lessons at a few different places in Atlanta. I was bartending on th...

Ben is joined by Gergely Orosz to discuss competitive sports, engineering career paths at big tech, his path to self employment, and the writing process.

Gergely is an ex-engineering manager and current author.  He's a prolific tweeter, blogger, and writer. 

Links - 

• The Pragmatic Engineer
• The Tech Resume
• The Philosophy of Software Design

Transcript -
Ben:
Hey. Welcome to this episode of The More Than Code podcast. Today, I'm really excited to have Gergely Orosz here with me. Hey, Gergely, thanks for joining.

Gergely:
Great to be here.

Ben:
I'm going to start off with, where did you grow up? And where do you live now?

Gergely:
I'm originally from Hungary, so quite a bit away. But after college... During university, I lived for two years in Kansas, middle of nowhere, I guess, but as a kid, you don't really notice that. And right after graduation, I moved to the UK, so I lived a few years at Edinburgh, a couple more in London, and now I'm in Amsterdam. Probably a bit more friendly here and now I have a family and kids, and this place is amazing with kids. But yeah, moved around quite a bit.

Ben:
Kansas, as in Kansas in the States or is there another Kansas somewhere?

Gergely:
Yeah, in the States. No, it's Kansas in State from when I was five to seven. My parents were researchers, so they got a grant there to work there. So I was in this tiny town, which seemed huge at the time called Lawrence.

Ben:
Cool. Is there a specific field they research in or what did they do?

Gergely:
It's Chemistry. It was really ironic because my dad told me that. This was in the... When he graduated, it was in the '70s or, yeah, I think late '70s. And at the time there were two fields that were really booming, chemistry and tech, as in software development and he wasn't sure which one to choose. He actually programmed in Fortran a little bit, but in the end he chose chemistry. And he said it was really interesting because it was pretty clear that chemistry would change the world, all the drugs were coming out.

Gergely:
By the time he graduated, things started to slow down a little bit, and now he's telling me that. This field is pretty difficult, there's less innovation and that his biggest regret was that the barrier to entry is really high in terms of, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to have hundreds of millions of dollars to set up a plant, research and some of those things. When I was growing up, he bought a lot of tech books just around the house. I think he tried to encourage us to just get into this.

Gergely:
I have a brother as well, we both graduated, we both chose university to study tech and we're both in tech field now.

Ben:
Nice. That worked out pretty well, I guess.

Gergely:
Yeah.

Ben:
You've had a very impressive career, companies like J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Uber, and now you're a full-time author. What led you to transitioning from that traditional big tech career to being an author?

Gergely:
It was more situational, I never planned for it. In fact, I don't think I planned for anything in my career. When some people look at my career, it does look impressive now looking back with the names. Honestly, I think a lot of it is luck. I joined some companies at the time when they were growing, for example, I joined Skype in London. I didn't know where I was going, all I knew was it sounded like a pretty cool opportunity. And it was right when Microsoft bought them and there was a huge growth following and I got to work on some fun projects.

Gergely:
Same thing later, I managed to join this smaller startup called Skyscanner, which had a tiny London office and it was in the middle of an explosive growth. And the same thing with Uber. I joined Uber when it was really hyped at the peak in 2016 before a lot of the negative press and negative news. Uber as a whole maybe didn't grow as much while I was there, but the office that I was Amsterdam really did.

Gergely:
Why I decided to become a full-time author, frankly, it's a few months, I just had to hit a pause. I was four years at Uber and I told myself that after four years, I'll look back and decide what do I want to do. Interesting enough, before Uber, I... My brother is in startups, he's on his second startup. Sold one and now he's starting a bootstrap, but he's raised capital for a second one. So in the family, I was always in the big stable companies and he's always doing his own thing, and I saw how difficult that is. It's really difficult to do a startup.

Gergely:
A lot of people are talking about how they want to do it, but after spending a few years at Uber, I felt a lot more ready for this surprising to myself. My main goal is potentially to start a startup or at least explore this opportunity, but I don't want to rush into it. And there was this book that's been on my mind for a long time and I've been writing it on the side, and I just found that a good timing to take a break from basically big tech or working as an employee at companies for a few months.

Gergely:
I also found I have this vivid memory. When I was in the US, in college, that's where I met my wife now. In Hungary, the average salary for engineer is like $20,000, something like that. Maybe these days it's a bit higher, 30,000. And someone told me that their dad works in tech and he makes 150K. And I was thinking to myself, oh man, if I ever made 150K, wow, my life will be sorted. That's just so much money.

Gergely:
And I had this memory of I was making more than 150K now, even in Europe with companies like Uber. And I also have good amount of saving because then I was reflecting on, hold on, I do have options. I don't have to stay in this field. I can explore, I can take some risks. So I just decided to take that risk. It felt like the good time for me and just push myself to do something new. One thing I've noticed about myself, I get bored if I do the same thing for more than a year. So this is just doing yet another challenge. I don't know how it work out. I might go back or I might just learn some new skills.

Ben:
Starting with the book seems like a pretty cool intro to a startup, because it has a lot of the same challenges, but maybe the hurdle is a little smaller. You finish the book and then the thing's done, whereas the startups, now they're quite done. Is that how you're looking at it or how do you approach that?

Gergely:
I really wanted to get this book done, and the book is about just summarizing a bit of my experience and outlooks. I was a software engineer for almost 10 years and I was lucky enough then to have the opportunity to move into management, which I also really enjoyed. And I really, really enjoyed helping people grow. I got such a kick out of it and I thought I was decent adage. What I also noticed is, especially in Europe, I am based in Europe. Here there is a lot bigger divide between the, I will say modern tech companies that are pretty common in Silicon Valley versus traditional tech companies.

Gergely:
And a lot of people I talk with have no clue what a senior should even look like. For example, ...

Ben is joined by Zach Inglis to discuss his sleep schedule, nomadic life, and how he approaches making the world a better place.

Zach is a designer and developer, perhaps best known for organizing HybridConf.  He runs a studio with his best friend.  He also enjoys losing at poker.

Links - 

• AmongUs
• Factorio
• The Diary of a Bookseller

Transcript -
Ben:
All right. Welcome to the latest episode of the More Than Code podcast. Today I'm super excited to have Zach Inglis here with me. Zach, how's it going?

Zach:
Oh, it's going well, thank you. How are you?

Ben:
Oh, I'm good. Getting settled down here in Georgia.

Zach:
Nice. Nice.

Ben:
I guess you recently moved as well. Where are you at now?

Zach:
I'm in Wales right now. I moved from Malaysia back to Wales which is nice. It wasn't completely my choice. I think the situation we're all in right now has dictated we have to do some things we don't necessarily want to do such as moving. It's really beautiful, very rainy. I'm happy to be back.

Ben:
Nice. Are you from Wales are where are you from?

Zach:
I'm from around the U.K. My parents are Scottish. I was born in London and I moved to the southwest. A place called Devon which, I guess you could say is the Iowa of the U.K... All farming. Wales, I've got the most affinity for. It's got the city, the sea and the countryside all at your doorstep. Which I think you can understand, right?

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. We actually just drove down to the beach for just a day this past weekend because it's a couple hours away. That was super, nice for mental health right now in these COVID times.

Zach:
Yes. I'm living by the water right now and it's just so calming.

Ben:
Yeah, awesome. Tell us a little bit about what you do for those that don't know. Yourself, Superhero Studios, the whole story.

Zach:
I run a two person studio with my best friend who I live with. We've been doing that for six years now. I'm a designer and a developer. I've had a successful career in both over the years. I think I've been doing it for around about 20 years now... A mixture of things. I tend to stick to design mostly nowadays. My business partner Laura, she tends to do the development. I'm grateful for knowing both. It means that I can foresee the problems coming before they come, stuff like that.

Ben:
That's very cool. I think that's pretty rare. Do you feel like you're stronger in one area or the other? How did that happen?

Zach:
Yes and no. I feel like overall I was weaker for being a generalist rather than being focused. However, having had two decades in this industry I've got to where I want to finally. It was a slower start but I think I'm stronger for it now. It's been good with work. Being able to bill yourself out as both means clients can feel a bit more relaxed knowing that you can communicate with the rest of the team.

Ben:
Makes sense. When I've done consulting, I've always had to be pretty upfront that I can make it work but I have no idea if it's going to look good or if it's not going to look good. It's always a hindrance.

Zach:
Yeah. I mean, having the smallest bit of knowledge about it is always helpful.

Ben:
Nice. You're in Wales. Is your family nearby? Where's your family nowadays?

Zach:
My family are all in London. In spite of loving big cities like Kuala Lumpur or New York, London just isn't for me personally so I'm out here. Yeah. Not as expensive and not as stressful.

Ben:
Excellent.

Zach:
Yeah? My brothers all live there and my nephew and niece and stuff. Unfortunately, I'm not getting to see them much but chatting every day.

Ben:
Oh, that's good. Pretty close to them?

Zach:
Yeah. Very, very close to them. I personally am not somebody who wants kids but having a nephew and niece is perfect. I can hand them back and get on with other things.

Ben:
Yeah. I like it. You were in Malaysia for a while and now you're back. How was the experience of being in Malaysia for you?

Zach:
I originally moved to Malaysia the first time 15 years ago. My ex-fiancee was from Malaysia. We'd go back and forth between America and Malaysia and I missed it. I missed the food and I missed the people. It's ridiculously beautiful, the jungle everywhere... Even in the city. So, I was super happy to go back. I made sure to stock up on all the food that I missed over the years. I miss it still every day. It's one of those things though. I think the grass is always greener. No matter where you are, you'll always miss something from the other side.

Ben:
Yeah. I'm definitely feeling that. and the lack of travel right now.

Zach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Ben:
How long were you in Malaysia this time?

Zach:
This time, a couple of years. Two years. I had a base in Malaysia and I traveled around Asia going to Thailand and stuff like that. I was very, very fortunate to be able to do that with how I work and my work schedule. To try to decompress I would then go a beach island and I'd go diving. That was my present to myself for working hard.

Ben:
I like it. What does diving do for you? Is it mediative? Is it physical? Sell me on it. Give me a pitch.

Zach:
Okay. Diving is the only place in the world where I do not think, where my brain does not run at 150 miles an hour. I go under the water and I'm just blank. Yeah. It's like meditation. I just feel relaxed and chill, and nothing else worries me except watching out for fish. I'm a water baby. Just being in the water makes me happy.

Ben:
Yeah. There is something just really special about water.

Zach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:
Do you get to dive there in England or is that not a thing in Wales?

Zach:
Sorry. It broke up.

Ben:
Do you get to dive where you're at now in Wales or is that not a thing there?

Zach:
There are diving experiences here like going to the quarry. The water's freezing, it's not great visibility. So, not really. When this all opens up again, who knows when, I'll go diving again. I'll travel to do so because it's very important to me. My whole left arm is tattooed with an underwater scene because of what it means to me.

Ben:
Awesome. Love the tattoo by the way.

Zach:
Thank you.

Ben:
I saw a picture of it. You mentioned it wasn't a big deal to be in Malaysia with the way you work. What is that way you work? I would especially think working with clients with the time zones could be weird. How do you manage that?

Zach:
Okay. I have a very weird sleep pattern. It doesn't matter where I live in the world, my body naturally pushes towards it. I have a delayed circadian rhythm. My body is always pushing me to sleep a little bit later every day. I've done a chart once and it just goes diagonally down as my sleep drifts so I tend to stay up at night until 7:00 or 8:00 A.M., and I go to sleep. I like it because there's no one else around with me and I can just focus. Whether it's work, or video games, or whatever I want to do personally. There's such a culture for eating food at random times of the day. It's a Muslim majority country, drinking is not as strong as the U.S. or the U.K. You can go get tea at midnight or at 2 A.M. and that's a very normal thing to do. People go and watch soccer at 3 A.M...

Ben is joined by Randall Kanna to discuss her personal life and career.  We discuss why she chose not to pursue a CS degree, the fortitude it took to get started in tech as a woman, and how she's paving the path for engineers without CS degrees.

Randall is a senior engineer and author.

Links - 

• https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Hurt-Me-Master-Your/dp/1544512287
• https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/zero-to-sold/
• https://twitter.com/dvassallo

Transcript -
Ben:
Welcome to this episode of the More Than Code podcast. Today, we have Randall Kanna joining us today. I'm really excited to have you here, Randall. Thanks for joining us.

Randall:
Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

Ben:
All right. So, let's start with kind of the beginning. Where did you grow up?

Randall:
Yeah, so I grew up in Sacramento, California, about two hours outside of the city in East Sacramento. My parents actually still live in that same area.

Ben:
Nice, and you're in San Francisco now?

Randall:
Yeah, I'm in the Bay Area. I just moved to Marin a little bit before COVID, so that was actually great timing because a little more space right now and have a lot of pets. So, they have a little bit more room.

Ben:
Nice. What pets do you have?

Randall:
I have a big German Shepherd and then I have two cats.

Ben:
Oh, that can't be easy on an apartment, right?

Randall:
Yeah. It was tough, and SF living when you have a shoe box and you're trying to raise an 80 pound dog.

Ben:
Nice.What actually took you to the Bay Area?

Randall:
So, a coding bootcamp. Kind of my dream was to work at Facebook or Google and that dream has changed, obviously, but I went to a coding boot camp about six years ago and kind of moved to the city, moved to a little bunk bed in Chinatown, which was a really crazy, fun experience. And I ended up just staying in the city for my first job after my bootcamp and kind of been around the area ever since.

Ben:
That's cool. How did you find the bootcamp experience? What's it? Was it worth it? Was it a good way to intro to the city? Because it seems kind of intimidating, right? The idea of moving to a new city for a new career for a bootcamp all at once.

Randall:
Oh, yeah, it was absolutely terrifying. I'm somewhat introverted, so going to a bootcamp like that was a terrifying experience. And in those days, it was like six years ago. I don't know if I can say in those days for six years ago, but six years ago, bootcamps were very different, very rigorous and difficult. So, some people compared it to getting a degree at an Ivy League school of how difficult it was. So, it was definitely a really rough experience. I was there for about three months, onsite almost every single day, except for some Sundays. So, overall it was difficult, but also a really fun experience, and I learned a lot and I got a job two weeks after the bootcamp. So, it really worked out for me.

Ben:
That's pretty great. Now, did the bootcamp place you, or did you find that job on your own?

Randall:
So, they actually had a career week where they spent a week going over your resume, interviewing skills, everything you can imagine of how to prepare you for a job. And because I went so in depth with working on my LinkedIn profile, that the company that eventually hired me reached out to me. But during that whole time, I was interviewing at multiple places, including Apple. So, I kind of had a lot of things in my back pocket, but I was really lucky that it worked out how it did at my first company.

Ben:
Cool. How are you liking San Fran? Do you plan to stay?

Randall:
Eh.

Ben:
[inaudible 00:03:32] San Fran. I mean the Bay Area. I guess, for those of us not there, we tend to think of it all as one thing, and I know it's actually two things.

Randall:
Oh, one big thing, really. I guess I'll have to get back to you if I leave the area in the next few years or not. I've already kind of moved out of the area, but yeah, right now I think it's a really great place to be if you can be in person at a company. And I think that's really fun and such an amazing experience, but with COVID right now, not the ideal place I would want to live.

Ben:
Do you think the COVID will cause this mass exodus from cities and San Francisco and the Bay Area, like all the articles are predicting?

Randall:
Yeah, I definitely think so. I think a lot of people our age right now are just naturally leaving, though, so I think that's also adding to it. I left right before COVID, and it was really good decision, but I know a ton of people leaving the city and my company right now, I just started a new job and they're giving up their lease in the city.

Ben:
Oh, wow. So, you're going full remote?

Randall:
Yeah. So, I just started actually this week, and I'll be permanently remote, but they're actually even just completely investing in remote work right now, which I really love.

Ben:
Interesting. Yeah. So, I moved to Boston for a job at Wayfair and then COVID happened. And when I took the job, we had discussed me going remote, because previous to this, I've had about a decade of full remote experience and COVID just kind of accelerated that timeline. So, that's why I'm now back down south in Georgia and going full remote for Wayfair now.

Randall:
Oh, that's awesome. I love Wayfair.

Ben:
Definitely interesting times.

Randall:
Yeah. Yeah. I love how companies are a little more open right now with remote.

Ben:
Yeah. Do you see yourself staying in the area and working remote? Would you prefer to stay remote, or is it too early to tell for you if you want to go back into the office?

Randall:
Yeah. I think it's too early to tell. I'll have to see how it plays out. It's hard to continue paying expensive Bay Area rent when you can't go anywhere, can't see anyone, can't take advantage of all the great things that the Bay Area offers.

Ben:
Yeah. That's got to be pretty painful. I know it was painful in Boston. That's nothing to the Bay Area.

Randall:
Yeah. Very expensive here. They say rent's dropping in the city though, substantially, but I have yet to see it.

Ben:
Interesting. So, your family, are they all back in Sacramento, or where are they spread out?

Randall:
They're a lot in Sacramento. My sister Madison is actually an engineer as well, and her company is remote right now, but they weren't in the past. It's called Keeper Security, so she's living in Sacramento and then my parents are in East Sacramento.

Ben:
Cool. How did they like you being away?

Randall:
They don't love it. Yeah. They miss me a lot. I was homeschooled my whole life, so very close knit family.

Ben:
Interesting. I was homeschooled with my whole life as well.

Randall:
Wow. That's so rare.

Ben:
[crosstalk 00:06:39] Yeah.

Randall:
Well, my mom actually co-founded homeschool.com, so I pretty much extensively used her curriculum.

Ben:
That's got to be the worst, actually.

Randall:
Yeah, it's difficult when your mom literally wrote the book on it.

Ben:
Okay. So, this leads me to new questions. Are you a fan of homeschooling? If you had kids, would you choose to homeschool?

Randall:
Oh, my gosh. That's a good question. What would you do?

Ben:
I would not, actually.

Randall:
Wow.

Ben:
So, I found the experience good ...

Ben is joined by Maia Bittner to discuss her personal life and career.  Delving in to how her anxiety has driven her so far and how she's working to recalibrate for what's next. 

Maia is an entrepreneur and investor.  She founded Pinch (which was acquired by Chime) and Rocksbox.  She is on the board of trustees for Olin College. 

Transcript -
Ben Edmunds:
Thanks for joining me today, Maia. Appreciate your time.

Maia Bittner:
Thanks so much for having me here.

Ben Edmunds:
Let's start from the beginning. Where did you grow up?

Maia Bittner:
I grew up in rural Washington State, so just south of the Canadian border and quite near the coast.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. I've been up to Forks, and I've been down to, I guess like Vancouver. Right? Where were you in relation to those?

Maia Bittner:
Yeah. Well, I was outside of Bellingham. It's about 90 miles north of Seattle.

Ben Edmunds:
Yeah. Cool. Nice. Where are you now?

Maia Bittner:
Very close. At the moment, I'm actually spending COVID times in Skagit County, which is just south of Bellingham. It's a little bit closer to Seattle, and close to all my family.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. I saw you were recently in New York. Do you still have an apartment there?

Maia Bittner:
Yes, I do still have an apartment there. Yes, I was in San Francisco for 10 years, and just moved to New York when the whole world came crashing down. Since I've been working from home all day, I came here just to shelter out the COVID time because there's a lot more space. I'm in this beautiful apartment. I spend all day, every day at home. Now, I don't know what the future looks like. It's hard to plan.

Ben Edmunds:
Understandable. You have your own place there or you're staying with family, or what's the situation?

Maia Bittner:
It's kind of a perfect situation, actually. My sister has an apartment that she normally rents out on Airbnb. I'm staying in that apartment, right? It's kind of a win-win scenario because fewer people are traveling on Airbnb, and I needed someplace that I can move in. It's all furnished and all decorated, and stuff like that. I just showed up with my suitcase.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. That's a pretty great setup. What took you from San Fran to New York?

Maia Bittner:
I needed a change of scenery. I had always wanted to live in New York. There was always something keeping me in San Francisco, mostly running companies there. For the first time, I realized that I didn't need to be in San Francisco, and so I wanted to take the chance to live in New York, and I love so much about New York. I love cities. I'm a real city person. New York is the best city. It's this hyper functional city in comparison to San Francisco, and I love public transportation, and I love walking and I love coffee shops and restaurants, and things like that. Yeah, I just wanted to live there.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. I lived in New York for three years, and moved away two years ago. Nothing compares to New York anymore. I'm in Boston now and I'm constantly comparing Boston to New York, and it's not nice to Boston.

Maia Bittner:
Totally, right? Boston, I lived in Cambridge. It's fine, right? It's just, like you're saying, you just can't compare it to New York.

Ben Edmunds:
Yeah. I miss it. Let's see, your family, you said is near there in Washington?

Maia Bittner:
Yeah. My whole family lives in Washington State. My dad is in Bellingham, my sister's out on Spanish Island, which is beautiful a island. My mom is east in the woods, and then my brother lives south in a suburb of Seattle. I'm sort of surrounded by everyone in my family right now. I've never lived here forever. They were like, "Maia's lives in California. We don't know why. We don't know what she's doing there." I was always the strange one that lives outside the state.

Ben Edmunds:
How did you end up in San Fran? Was it for school or for companies?

Maia Bittner:
The internet, right? I grew up even on the internet and enmeshed in internet startups. I love startups. I love new projects. I love trying ... I remember trying all the new browsers that existed, right, in the browser wars, and I was big on eBay, and I used [inaudible 00:03:56] never ending, and I was one of the first users of Flickr. I was really in that world. I actually ... I went to college in Boston, as many people do. After my freshman year, I had an internship in San Francisco, which makes sense. That's where all the things that I like were located. Then once I got there, I was like, this is amazing, This is exactly what I want to do with my life, and I didn't go back to school for a while after, I kind of I took some time off to stay out there.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. It has a very specific energy there. That's the great thing about New York and San Fran, to me, is they have they're own vibe.

Maia Bittner:
Definitely.

Ben Edmunds:
College, where'd you go? How'd you like it? I believe you're still involved. Tell us a little bit about that.

Maia Bittner:
Yeah. I went to ... it's a very unique school, so called the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. It is only engineering. They only do engineering degrees. It's very small. There's only 75 students per year, so 300 students in the whole school, and it's very new. The first class graduated in 2006, so it's a whole bunch of crazy all at once. I liked it okay, but I also think it was the best possible school for me to go to, if that makes sense. I think that I am not a great fit with school. I've always struggled with school. I didn't want to go to college because I hated school. I didn't really believe in formal education. I thought I would learn more on my own, and I thought that it was also super expensive to go to school and not just the cost of going to school, but it's four years of lost earnings.

Maia Bittner:
You could be making money, and instead you're spending money, and so I wasn't going to go to school, but then I found Olin. At the time, they don't do this anymore, but they offered full tuition scholarships, so it was very affordable. Every accepted student got a full tuition scholarship. They thought that formalized education was broken as well. They were like, it doesn't make sense for the modern era. The world has changed and we're still teaching people the same way. Engineers are still thinking inside the box and coming up with the same solutions to the same problems. We want to innovate and do things differently. They have a different grading system. A lot of the coursework is different.

Maia Bittner:
There's no concept. There's no calculus class at Olin. Calculus is not taught separate from Physics. It's just one course, where physics is just applied calculus. Calculus is just an obstruction of physics, and they're just related to each other. Very cool school. It really looped me in and very recently, I actually joined the board. The reason I did that is, I'm very excited, so Olin, the impact it has had, honestly, has been so amazing. It doesn't really get credit for that, which is okay, but it has changed the way that engineering education is taught at MIT, at Caltech, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as in schools around the world, right? More schools are doing the Olin way of having people try things first, and then learning the theory behind it...

Ben sits down with Taylor Otwell to discuss his personal life, what drives him, how he got started with Laravel, and what's next.

Taylor is the creator of the Laravel PHP framework, conference organizer, and successful entrepreneur. 

Transcript -
Ben Edmunds:
I hear you're leaving Laravel to work on Symphony full-time now?

Taylor Otwell:
Heck yeah, man. I got three or four lines of code merged in there. It's pretty crazy that we haven't had to merge anything before. But anyway, yeah, finally got that badge.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. Kind of surprised you haven't had to. Is it that you usually code around it, or you just haven't hit a case where you needed it?

Taylor Otwell:
We just haven't hit a case that we couldn't extend something or tweak something the way we wanted to. The stuff that we mainly use Symphony for is the HTTP request stuff, so the HTTP spec is not something that's changing every day, so it's pretty much stable and we never really have to mess with it.

Ben Edmunds:
Okay. So what was your commit, for those listening?

Taylor Otwell:
They had deprecated being able to ... you have a request come in, and that request has inputs on it, say, from a form. Maybe you have a name one. And there's a middleware, Laravel, that if you get an empty string in an input, it will just change it to "null," and I think the idea behind that is it sort of makes it consistent between your JSON and form endpoints. Anyway, they had deprecated being able to set a request attribute to null. You had to set it to either a string or an array, and so I sort of un-deprecated that in my pull request.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. Cool. So let's start from the beginning, I guess. You're in Arkansas, is that right?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Ben Edmunds:
Did you grow up there, or how did you end up there?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, my family have lived in Arkansas since the 1830s, something like that, and around pretty much the same town, Hot Springs, Arkansas, which is the hood home of Bill Clinton, kind of its claim to fame, and also the first national park, actually, in the United States.

Taylor Otwell:
So, I grew up there, went to high school there, and now I just live 30 minutes from there, pretty close to Little Rock, Arkansas, which is the capital of Arkansas. So I've pretty much always been here. I went to college, Arkansas Tech, yeah, so pretty much born and raised right here.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. Did you go to college for CS or what did you go for?

Taylor Otwell:
I went to college for a degree called Information Technology, which is a lot of computer networking type stuff, routers, switches, I had a DBA class, I had two semesters of C++, which is any computer major at that school has to take that, but I didn't do anything beyond those two semesters of C++ programming-wise.

Taylor Otwell:
They had an optional PHP course which I would have taken now, just to see what that was like.

Ben Edmunds:
Hope [inaudible 00:03:39] completely screwed you up.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, it was PHP and Apache, and basically the LAMP stack on Linux. Yeah, I had some other courses ... like I said, the DBA course, which was pretty nice, and then there was a software management course, which it was all kind of on different methods of software project management, waterfall, agile, stuff like that. I had a course on that kind of stuff.

Ben Edmunds:
Huh. Did you finish the degree?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I finished the degree. So that was a four year degree from Arkansas Tech. Bachelor's in information technology. And when I was kind of wrapping up my senior year, I always just assumed I'll be a network admin at some business or hospital or school or whatever. I never really expected to be a programmer. I had never really programmed anything serious. I had programmed my TI-83 calculator in high school, and I knew HTML and basic CSS and stuff, and I build simple websites when I was kid or whatever, but I was not a serious programmer. So I didn't really expect to really go down that road, but then this company from Fort Smith, Arkansas, which was two hours from where I went to school, they came to interview ... because they only hire new college graduates, period. They don't bring on anyone else. It's kind of an interesting setup, but people end up working there for 30 years, so it works out for them.

Taylor Otwell:
And whoever they hire, they put through a six month training program, so I think their approach is to hire really fresh graduates and then just train them to be exactly how they want them to be, and then they work there for a while.

Taylor Otwell:
So I went through that six month training program once they hired me, and that's where I actually learned how to program for real. .NET, COBOL, JCL, ASP Classic and ASP.NET. We did a bunch of different stuff. It was pretty intensive all-day training for six months. And then I would have a few days off to work on random little projects just to get my feet wet. I know the first thing I ever worked on there was COBOL, CICS Screen 2. The phone number field needed validation, it was just letting any random input into the field, and so I was supposed to validate that. It took me two days to figure out how to do that.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. That's interesting, because that's very old-school way to think about a company, right...

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Ben Edmunds:
... company out of high school, or out of college, and then you stay there for 30 years. That's great.

Taylor Otwell:
Yep. And there we definitely people that ... when I got there, the CEO of that company, who was well into his 60s age-wise, he had started as a programmer in the 70s, and he had just worked there all the way up. They promote within the whole way up to the top. So anyone that's corporate ... a C-level officer there started at the bottom.

Taylor Otwell:
It is a pretty interesting company. It used to be called Arkansas Best Freight. Now it's ArcBest. I think they've renamed themselves.

Ben Edmunds:
Gotcha. That's cool. So I understand why it's changed, and I wouldn't necessarily want to work in the same place for 30 years, but [crosstalk 00:06:59] that's not quite a thing we have anymore where you can work up from the "janitor" up to CEO.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. It's crazy, because once I left there, I realized, programmers like me and you, or people that work on open source stuff, are kind of the exception. A lot of programmers ... the vast majority of programmers at that company just went to work, they programmed, and they went home. They did not participate in the Twitter developer scene, they did not participate in the Reddit developer scene, they didn't think about development at all once they got off work.

Taylor Otwell:
There was only a group of maybe 10 out of 150 or 200 programmers that programming was a hobby to them in a way. So yeah, once I left there, I had never really been exposed to open source until I started Laravel all that much, and of course, I had played with coding there a little bit. But I don't know, I didn't really start coding as a hobby until then. I just got off work and went home and did other stuff.

Ben Edmunds:
Interesting. Kind of [inaudible 00:08:14] that some days, right?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Ben Edmunds:
Some of those things were like, "Do what you love," and "never not be working."

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I didn't even have a computer at home for a while. I just had an iPad.

Ben Edmunds:
Really? You didn't take a laptop home or anyt...

A quick intro to the idea behind the podcast.

Transcript -
Ben Edmunds:
Welcome to the More Than Code podcast. I'm Ben Edmunds. You might know me from the PHP Town Hall podcast or the PHP programming community in general. 

This podcast is to interview specific members of the tech community, delve into their past, their future, their home life, how they work, really just what makes them tick. We're going to get away from the keyboard, talk about who they are as a person and how they are more than their code. I hope you enjoy this. 

We're going to do a six episode season to start. You'll get an episode every month, at least through the end of 2020. All right, thanks. Hope you enjoy.