Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Mark Bates

This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Mark Bates who is a consultant, trainer, entrepreneur, co-founder of PaperCall, and an author! Chuck and Mark talk about PaperCall, GO, Ruby, JavaScript, and helping others within the community. Check out today’s episode to hear more!

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

0:00 – Get A Coder Job!

0:59 – Chuck: Hi! I saw we were on Episode 198! We talked about Ruby and different communities.

1:25 – Guest: Yes, we were talking about the conference we were trying to start, which never took-off!

1:50 – Chuck: You talked about how you are working with GO now. You are an author, too!

2:06 – Guest: That came out in 2009. My 2nd son was born the day before that went to print.

2:42 – Chuck: How many kids do you have?

2:47 – Guest: I have 2 kids.

3:00 – Chuck: Happy Birthday buddy! Let’s talk about your journey into and out of Ruby!

3:15 – Guest: I will be happy to.

3:23 – Chuck:

3:27 – Guest: I have a degree in music and studied guitar in England. I came back in 1999 and needed a job. If you could spell HTML then it was good – then if you could work with it then it was even better!

The guest mentions Liverpool, England.

4:20 – Guest: I got a job and transitioned into other things. Fell in-love with Java at the time – and then moved into straight development. I needed money, I had skills into it, and then I fell in-love with

5:10 – Chuck: What aspect in music are you into?

5:14 – Guest: I am a singer/songwriter, and yes into guitar.

5:57 – Chuck: Yeah, they used to have jam sections at conferences.

6:37 – Chuck: I find in interesting how much crossover there is between music and programming/coding. I hear them say: I found I needed to build a site for the band and whatnot.

7:25 – Guest: Yeah, I can do view source and I can figure out that I am missing a tag. That put me ahead in 1997 and 1998! I had done some work that.

8:57 – Chuck: You don’t even have to generate a JavaScript project with that – can I find the template and can I go?

9:14 – Guest: Yes programming has come a long way.

9:22 – Chuck: It is interesting, though. When we talk about those things – it was a different time but I don’t know if it was easier/harder for people to come into the career field now.

9:52 – Guest: Yes, I am into the educational side of it, too. There was a lack of books on the subject back-in-the-day. There is almost too much material now.

Guest: I do a Google search that will give me something that is most recent. There is no reason to have to dig through material that isn’t relevant anymore.

Guest: I used NOTEPAD to write websites.

11:29 – Chuck: Yes, and then Notepad plus, plus!

11:39 – Guest: Those days are gone. If you want to build a website you go to a company that does that now. 

The guest refers to Kubernetes, Ruby, HTML, Sequel and much more!

12:55 – Guest: I see the new developers getting overwhelmed in the beginning they need to learn 10 languages at once. I am fortunate to have come into the industry when I did. I don’t envy them.

13:56 – Chuck: Talking about how complicated the Web is getting. What led you to Ruby on Rails?

14:12 – Guest: In 2004 – I just finished a Java project that had roughly 100,000 lines of configuration!! Everything in Java at that point was XML configuration.

I didn’t like debugging XML – and it wasn’t fun. I was refiguring out my career. Everything at the time was XML and more XML! I didn’t want to be in that world. I quit developing completely for 2 years. I worked as an internship in a recording studio for a while. I got to work with a lot of great people, but there was a lack of money and lack of general employment. We wanted to have kids and at the end of 2005 a friend mentioned Ruby on Rails. He told me that it’s NOT Java and that I would love it. I installed it and found an old cookbook tutorial and immediately I said: THAT’s what I want programming to be. When did you pick up Ruby on Rails?

18:14 – Chuck: I picked it up when I worked for...and I was doing Q&A customer service.

19:05 – Guest: Yeah, he hooked me for sure – that jerk! I really got into this book! Check it out! It changed my career and web development entirely. For all the grief we give Rails it did change the world.

20:40 – Chuck: What have you done in Ruby that you are particularly proud of?

20:50 – Guest: Most proud running Boston RB. We had so many people show up!

22:49 – Chuck: You talk about those things and that’s why I ask the question in the first place. And it turns out that: I did THIS thing in the community! I like talking to people and helping people.

23:31 – Guest: Yes, I get to work and help people all around the world. Sweet! I get to go in and help people. It gives me the time to contribute to open source and go to Slack. I have a career based around: Helping People! I like the code that I created, but I like the community stuff I have done over the years.

24:31 – Chuck: Yep my career coach wanted me to create a vision/mission statement for DevChat T.V. We make a difference and people make career changes b/c they are getting help and information

25:23 – Guest: Making a living off of helping people is a great feeling!

25:44 – Guest: The contents of the book are wildly out-of-date, but the origin story is hysterical. I went to a conference in 2008 and was just laid-off in October 2008. I got into a hot tub in Orlando and someone started talking to me about my recent talk. By the way, never write a book – don’t do it!

28:18 – Chuck: Sounds like a movie plot to me!

28:25 – Guest: Oh no – that’s not a good movie idea!

28:50 – Chuck and Guest go back-and-forth with a pretend movie: who would play you?

29:15 – Chuck: Let’s talk about PaperCall?

29:23 – Guest: I hated that (for conferences) you had to enter in a lot of different forms (2-3 proposals) for one conference. This bothered me and was very time-consuming.

31:45 – Guest & Chuck talking about saving time.

32:37 – Chuck: What are you doing now?

32:42 – Guest: Yeah, I get to go around and help engineers and open source exclusively.

33:48 – Chuck: How did you get into GO?

33:53 – Guest: In about 2012 I started looking into GO.

The guest talks about the benefits and why he likes GO!

36:28 – Guest: What you see is what you get in GO, which is what I like!

39:13 – Chuck: It is an interesting language, and I haven’t played around with it as much as I would like to. I love trying new things, and see how it solves problems.

40:30 – Guest.

42:00 – Chuck: Picks!

42:06 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!

END – CacheFly

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Chuck

Mark