My Ruby Story 009 Brian Hogan On this episode we have another My Ruby Story and there is a good chance you might recognize him, he is one of Devchat.tv’s panelists Brian Hogan. Aside from being a panelists on Ruby Rouges, he also has a couple other projects like codecaster.io as well as Railsmentors.org. How did you get into programming? Brain talks about how his Dad has an old Apple 2 computer. His father was a teacher for the blind and the computer had a box on it that would talk. His Dad taught him that computers can have programs written for them and make them do things. Brain talks about having math issues one evening and his Dad helped by making a math program that would quiz him. His Dad wasn’t a programmer but he had picked up some of it from being around it. Brain talks about how the library had games you could get for the Apple 2 but you had to write code into the computer to make it work. He started tweaking the code to learn that it adjusted things in the game like the speed of the spaceship or the damage of the bomb. Brian’s First Program Brian’s first program was in fourth grade. He had an assignment on the topic of the seas and instead of doing a typical handwritten assignment he created a program for it. He learned that he could make the computer do things. Over time Brian got interested in other things, planning to go to school for law. His Dad lost his job making his plans for law school unreachable without student loan debt. He started making money on the side repairing and building computers. Computers solving problems He talks about how he never really got into the computer science level of things, but he was always excited about being able to solve people’s problems with computers. He remembers getting internet for the first time. It was Netscape and it came with a book on how to setup the internet and then in the last chapter it had a section teaching how to make a webpage with HTML. He loved making websites and so he made pages for businesses and made money on the side. He went to college aiming for computer science and then when he got into classes like computational theory, he found that it was boring to him still. He changed his major to business. He then got a job working for the college working with website stuff. The developer for the pages ended up quitting and so they asked Brian to help out. So he learned Microsoft server SQL and ASP. He adds that essentially he fell into web development by accident. He talks about his code being bad until he learned Ruby, crediting Ruby with making object oriented programming easier to understand. Charles mentions that he felt the same way in school, it wasn’t until he needed to fix a real problem that programming really started to seem useful and fun. Brian talks about how he isn’t really the best programmer, but his strengths are helping other people to program. He has trained many people to program since then. Learning with Context He talks about in school how they throw JavaScript at you and teach you the higher concepts before understanding it. He tells about how doing something like teaching Git on the first day doesn’t make sense because the students don’t understand why they need it. He suggests that the thing that is missing from the curriculum is the real work connection. Majority of adults need to be able to connect what they are learning to something they have already learned. Context is important for learning. How did you get into Ruby? Brian talks about doing PHP for a while as well as ASP. He was working with a project as an Oracle DBA. They were moving from Java to an Oracle Database. But no one there knew what Java was and a person there named Bruce suggested that the work they were doing would be better written in Ruby. The team disagreed but afterward one day Brian...