My Ruby Story

MRS 013 – Dave Thomas This episode is a My Ruby Story with Dave Thomas. Dave has spoken about Elixir at two Ruby Remote Confs. He challenges the way people think about the way they do code. Listen to learn more about Dave! [00:02:42] How did you get into programming? Dave first got into programming when he was attending school in England. At the age of sixteen everyone takes national tests. A group of friends and Dave took these tests early so they did not have classes to take spring semester. Their school decided to send them to take a computer science class at a nearby technical college. There he fell in love with programming and decided to switch his focus in college. He went to Imperial College, where computer science was a brand new degree: it was only in the second year of being offered. [00:05:45] How did you get into Ruby? Dave has always been a language nerd. In the 90s you had to be determined to work with computer languages. People posted their compilers on usenet in parts. He downloaded files from this site to play with these languages. In 1997 or 1998, he downloaded Ruby overnight, started playing with it, and fell in love. It was similar to Pearl, which he was using at the time. Dave thought Ruby was easier to work with and it became his language of choice. He wrote a book with Andy Hunt and it became the pickaxe. Dave and some friends set up the first Ruby conference in Florida after the book was released. [00:13:50] Do you feel like we get as many of “breath of fresh air” talks these days in Ruby as we used to? No but that is to be expected. The problems, people, and interest have changed. Ruby has matured and there are fewer people in the community than there used to be. [00:15:23] In terms of this cycle that you're seeing, where would you put Elixir? Elixir is brand new, whereas Ruby had been around a long time. Elixir caught on fast, which was a surprise. People were doing large-scale commercial work in it within eighteen months. There are elements of homesteading going on; a lot of people are coming from Ruby to Elixir trying to tell people how to do it. Dave has been through thing similar to this in the past where he can recognize things that will be potentially harmful to the community and try to stop some of those things happening. [00:22:06] How did you discover Elixir? He came across it twice. The first time was five years ago but he did not really find a use for it. Then a year ago he was doing a Rails course in Virginia with Cory Haynes. He wanted a functional language so that people could better understand functional programming. Cory suggested Elixir and Dave tried it out again that night. He fell in love with the potential of Elixir. It wasn’t an opinionated language, just transparent. Elixir is fast and reliable. [00:29:18] Contributions to the community Dave became one of the people that everyone came to ask about Ruby, which he is proud of because it spread a new way of thinking about programming. He evangelized Ruby and Rails to more than 10,000 people. He has done evangelism just to make programmers happier. [00:36:11] What are you up to now?  He is still trying to help people write code with Elixir in order to help their lives become easier. Dave has created a course on how to write Elixir “Dave Thomas style.” Picks: Dave: He wants people to do their own picks. Think of 3 things that make you proud to be a human being. Links: https://pragdave.me/

MRS: 012 Simon Moro This episode is a My Ruby Story with Simon Moro. Simon is an Australian record producer and mixer. He has been teaching himself Ruby for the last 18 months, Rails framework, and is a frustrated aspiring entrepreneur. Through negative experiences with outsourcing and finding tech co-founders, he wanted to empower and educate himself. How did you get into programming? He remembers that the first computer in his home was actually called a dinosaur. His first experience with a computer made him intrigued. He was a lot of gaming consoles when he was young. Personally liked Sega and his best friend liked Nintendo. It was like an early Apple vs. Android rivalry. He was introduced to visual basic in an InfoTech class in high school. His high school didn’t have a strong tech department so it was a very simple class. There was a button that you would click which would display a dialogue box with a calculator. He was fascinated by the way you could write instructions. He had always been full of ideas. The idea that you could create a digital product just by writing text fascinated him. He started borrowing books from the library and even bought a few. He tried to teach himself. When he got older he used HTML and found WordPress useful as a music programmer and for the digital products he created. It wasn’t until 18 months ago that he thought he would try to learn a language and build something. Connection Between Music and Programming There are a lot of programmers that are also musicians. People don’t often acknowledge that there is creativity in code. Music and code may be appealing to people for the same reasons: because there is both science and creativity in both areas. Music is about agreements within a culture. Musicians agree that certain notes blended with each other either do or do not work. This is how they program symphonies and refactor sheet music to make it easier to read. Music is a process of solving problems creatively using a structure where if you go outside of that structure it won’t work. This is similar to front-end frameworks. In musical theory a lot of things are mathematical. There is a science of music and what makes it sound good. This is foundational in the same way math is the foundation in computer science. Did you start programming in WordPress or did your interest in programming come from something else? Simon did little in WordPress in terms of learning to program. He delved into CSS and changed themes using Envarto. He outsourced those tweaks to people from freelancing websites. He did try to learn PHP for his wife’s product but realized he didn’t do it correctly. He was involved in Melbourne startup world and heard about Ruby on Rails through that. He researched it after he heard about it and read about the philosophy behind it. He raised capital to build a product production management tool for music producers. He built it in Ruby on Rails, and a company in Deli built that for him. He had to fire them and start again. Because he’d been exposed to it, decided he’d delve into it and teach himself because if he’d started his learning at the same time he’d hired the company he could have taken over once he fired that company. He tells people that they can teach themselves if they have time and has people they can ask for help if they get stuck. Are you building the mbp for your own product? Simon built it himself. He had found a tech co-founder 18 months ago but it went south. Five weeks ago he finally decided to do it himself. He focused on one particular feature for receiving client feedback on a work in progress for music. A band that’s sending demos to each other can upload a song and add comments of change requests within the site. How did you come to Ruby? What was it about Ruby and how did you find it that made you decide to want to do this type of work in Ruby as opposed to PHP or something else? Simon started reading the philosophy around Ruby; then looked at the code. He thought the Ruby language and the Rails code made sense compared to PHP. He believed that PHP had too much code. He also likes the elegance of Ruby and the Rails framework, the organization, and the syntax. What kinds of things have you done with Ruby? Is this your first and only product/project? Have you done other things? Ways to learn? He believes that the way he is learning is most useful to beginners. The first thing that he did is to jump into a Ruby on Rails course through Treehouse. He found it confusing but he completed the course. A friend told him he thought it’d be helpful to learn Ruby through lynda.com. After that, he could separate Rails and Ruby. He started making quick prototypes to help learn and putting together budgets for projects apps, which he used for himself. Do you find that the courses were enough or did you have to find groups of people who were coding or find a mentor? It has helped by having people he could reach out to. He hasn’t had formal meetings with mentors. He had a problem with Track Bits and his friend Rahj helped find a solution to a problem one day. He has had moments where he’s been stuck like that and had someone help him. It is difficult to know what questions to ask Google to get the answers. Having someone to point the things out he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know is helpful. What was it that made you get to the point that you said, “I’m pretty comfortable with this, and I think I can do a good job with it.” He graduated from audio production in 2000. He has generally been the opposite of confident. He always assumes that he can always learn more, when he started out he was more confident than he is now in his craft. He now knows how important his role is in his client’s potential for connecting with an audience and his client’s potential for going further in their career. When he was younger he thought he could do things because he was trained so he could do things. Picks Simon:

• Kevin Skoglund Lynda.com https://www.lynda.com/Ruby-training-tutorials/303-0.html
• Official documentation: http://ruby-doc.org/
• Cycling
• Zwift: www.zwift.com

Charles:

• Envarto: www.envato.com
• Free Music Archive: www.freemusicarchive.org
• YouTube: www.youtube.com

Links:

• Track Bits: www.trackbits.com

•  

MRS O11 Greg Baugues This episode of My Ruby Story features Greg Baugues. Greg has been on two previous episodes, episode 142 where he discussed mental illness, and episode 258 where he discussed Twilio. Greg has been at Twilio for three and a half years. He worked on the developer/evangelism team for three years. A couple of months ago he became the lead developer of the community team. He lived in Chicago for eleven years, where he first started using Ruby. He moved to Brooklyn, New York a year ago. How did you get into programming? When he was five or six his parents owned a TRS-80 when he was five or six. It had a cassette drive and when turned on it booted into basic. He wrote programs in basic on this computer and it was an instant gratification to him. On a back cover of a magazine, he read there would be a code printed in basic that he would copy line by line. Later, his family bought a PC that had MS-DOS with QBasic, and his friends introduced him to Pascal, C, and C++. When he graduated high school he started PHP and got into web stuff. How did you get from PHP and web stuff to Ruby? In 1999 Greg used PHP to start a dot-com company with which they sold eight months later for all equity. He jokes that he “started and sold a company and all I got was a polo shirt out of it.”  This reinforced that he always wanted to work in programming but that he would never be happy just programming. He wanted to be involved working on the people side of things, too. He got a job at a consulting agency at Table XI where he was a sales guy. He claims that he wasn’t good at sales, so stopped programming for one and a half to two years in order to become better. Then he traveled with his wife in Europe for a while. This showed him that he spent his free time programming. After this he picked up Ruby for the first time. Ruby was his first language of choice because Table XI and most of Chicago was using Ruby at the time. He also fell in love with it. What was it about Ruby that you thought was cool? Greg finds Ruby beautiful and expressive. He believes that it makes more sense than for loop and believes that you can explain it to someone who’s never done coding before and it makes sense to them. Writing Ruby is the closest you can come to writing pseudo code that actually runs. Ruby doesn’t look much different from pseudo code. He thinks it is a joy to write in Ruby. What contributions do you feel like you’ve made to the Ruby community? Greg believes that his biggest contribution would be in the vein of mental health. He has Bipolar Disorder and was on a Ruby Rogues podcast where he spoke about it. Because of his disorder, he failed out of college, had trouble with relationships, getting out of bed, paying bills, and a lot of guilt. He finally got treatment in 2007 where medication slowly helped. Four years ago he had a coworker who overdosed that had been showing symptoms of the same disorder. The next day instead of doing a lightening talk he had scheduled about fantasy football, he gave a talk about mental illness and started giving talks about mental illnesses everywhere in the Ruby community. Charles tells Greg that he heard someone speak about him and said he’d decided to go get help and have a relationship with his family again. He said that Greg’s episode of the podcast had helped him, and others have emailed him about it too. He explains that changing the way someone lives is just as important as writing source code. Greg says that he has learned that we are not alone in this community. There is a value of sharing your story and being vulnerable. It is easy to underestimate the compassion and empathy people have in the Ruby community. What are you working on now? Greg just had a conference called Signal for Twilio two weeks ago. There were 2,000 developers and 100 speakers at the conference. He was part of the team that organized speakers. Two months ago he started a leadership role with the developer community team for the first time. He’s trying to learn how to be in a management role for the first time. There were a million developers that signed up for Twilio so he is trying to figure out how to organize a community of developers instead of just having customers. Picks Greg:

• Phil Nash: https://philna.sh/
• The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920056843.do
• The Tim Ferriss Podcast with Jamie Foxx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGnnEfmP8K4
• The Ezra Klein Show: https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast

Charles:

• Ruby Dev Summit: https://rubydevsummit.com/

Links:

• Email: [email protected]
• Twilio Voices: https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/say
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/greggyb

My Ruby Story Dave Kimura On this episode Charles talks to Ruby Rouges panelist Dave Kimura, the creator of Drifting Ruby, the popular Ruby on Rails Screencast and Blog. Find out more about how Dave got interested in programming and first introduced to the world of Ruby. Dave also talks about how and when he started Drifting Ruby. How did you get into programming? Dave discusses living in Germany during middle school in the 90s. During this time, he owned a simple Mac LC II. He found a floppy disc that contained a program called Chipmunk Basic, which was his very first exposure into the world of programming. His interest with programming was further sparked by computers at school. These computers were loaded with three different programs: Fortran, Pascal, and C compiler. All of these peaked his interest in programming further.  
 Charles and Dave discuss the impact technology made.  Dave tells Charles that anything that pre-dates the Internet feels like a different world; one in which learning was more complicated. He talks about how technology has come a long way in the past 20 years. He discusses the creativity that people have displayed and how amazed he is by the progression of different applications. How did you make the transition from different programs such as PHP and ActionScript into Ruby? Dave discusses his work as a Systems Administrator at an engineering firm for the past 6 years after college. He talks about being at his current job at Sage Software for almost 8 years and that he does not believe in job hopping, although many do today. He states that he has no valid reasoning that he went with Ruby over Python or another program. He says that he did not like PHP or asp.net. Instead he wanted something new. Dave wanted to do things the way he wanted to do, which can’t be done in Python. A big part of his decision was made when he looked at Matz’s twitter. Matz seemed happy which led Dave to pick Ruby, which he thinks is mainly a good “dumb luck” decision. What kinds of things have you done with Ruby? Dave says that the coolest thing he’s done is with a Raspberry Pi his brother gifted him in 2013–2014 for Christmas. He built a CNC machine and a Ruby Gem called a Router out of it. He explains that he wrote an interpreter to read and control the machine. He adds that he has built a bunch of hardware as well. How did Drifting Ruby come about? Dave says that his inspiration is Ryan Bates, who created RailsCast and went off the grid in 2013. He strives to fill in the high bar that Ryan left by producing quality material. When did you start Drifting Ruby? Dave started Drifting Ruby in 2015, which is a couple years after RailsCast. He explains that he was not entirely committed to the program at first. He explains that he has revamped the audio setup two or three times. So where are you hoping to get to with it? Are you just trying to put good content out or monetize as well? Dave is currently focused on releasing good content. He wants to give back to the Ruby community and feels good that people are able to use the content he produces. Eventually he states that it will go to a subscription base, but does not have a definite date as to when. He is very dedicated to his work, as he spends 10 to 15 hours of his weekend working on episodes. Are there things that you feel that you have contributed to the Ruby community?  Dave feels like his commitment to Ruby Rogues has been consistent but is not a hassle. He doesn’t look at it as something he wants to get paid for because he enjoys the time he dedicates weekly. He doesn’t feel like he’s had anything big other than Drifting Ruby. So what are you working on now? Dave is currently working on a money manager that he uses with his wife. He built this Ruby on Rails application in 2011–2012 off of the premise he learned at a Dave Ramsey conference. He states that he recently rewrote it and cleaned up so that it uses the latest Rails 5.1.1. The application helps budget money for bills, groceries, spending money, etc. using a digital envelope system. He states that anyone is able to use the program, and it has made a difference in his life. Picks Dave Harbor Freight Charles Ketogenic diet Spaghetti Squash Links Dave’s Twitter
Drfting Ruby Twitter
Drifting Ruby

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 was talking to Bruce about a side project he was working on and how he wasn’t accomplishing it the way he wanted to. Bruce asked him to get lunch with him. Brian then talks about how in life if someone very smart asks you to get lunch that you should drop everything and do it. In a single night he was able to accomplish everything he was trying to. He took his project to work the next day and they said they wouldn’t be able to use it on Windows. Brian started working on finding ways to deploy it, and that has been the starting point of Ruby for Brian. He went to Rails full time after that. Publishing an article on how to get it deployed. His work with Ruby led to him teaching and writing books. When he needs to make something heavily data driven he always reaches for Ruby. He isn’t interested in scalability because usually he is working on a small business process behind the firewall used by less than 100 people. Framework Peer Pressure Brian talks about the fear and pressure to use the latest and greatest frameworks in the development community. He talks about how the only people who know what framework a person uses is the developer and the peers. You don’t get paid to impress peers in the community. A developer gets paid to solve peoples problems. Charles and Brian add that using new frameworks are great and can teach you new ways to solve problems, but no matter how a person solves a problem, it should be celebrated. Learn new things but don’t make people feel bad for not doing things the same way you do them. Brian adds that another reason he likes Rails is that it has a lot of things that came from basecamp and it is a well developed and tested and the framework is strong. He talks about how sometimes frameworks come out and they weren’t well thought out. Rails is not an academic framework but it is easier to integrate or upgrade to by design. What contributions have you made to the Ruby community? Brian talks about getting the Rails deploy working for Windows is one of his proudest moments. Other than that his contribution has been mainly helping people find mentors at Railsmentors.org. On Railsmentors.org, most of the work is done by volunteers and help a lot of people. Charles adds that sometimes open source project contributions tend to get glorified but things like Railsmentors.org are really what make the community great. What are you working on now? Brian talks about how he is working on a book but he can’t tell much about it at the moment. He also works on the content team on Digital Ocean. He helps other community authors with their writing and to get it published and out. He also handles some system admin background to test that each article works and he finds it a good way to keep his skills tuned. He is also working on a project in Elixir for teachers to work in the classroom better. For a teacher teaching development they can use the program, CodeCaster, to display code to the screens and the students can do things like flag things they don’t understand or let the teacher know that it’s moving too fast. It allows the students send up code for the teacher to check as well as the teacher get a snapshot of what’s on the students screen to check on them. Picks Brian Exercises for Programmers
Tmux 2 Productive Mouse-Free Development Charles Coursera on AI
Artificial Intelligence in Python Links Twitter
bphogan.com

My Ruby Story 315 Jordan Hudgens In this episode it’s another My Ruby Story and this week’s story is Jordan Hudgens’. Jordan is lead instructor of Bottega, a code school based in Lehi, Utah but also located in Phoenix and Salt Lake City. You’ll hear a bit about how Decamp.com came to be as well as what makes it stand out from the rest. You’ll also catch a couple tangents including one on artificial intelligence, augmented reality, an IoT. Don’t miss this one! How did you get intro programming? Jordan talks about how at the age of 12 his father had a business and with their budget couldn’t afford a web designer. His father offers Jordan to buy him a computer if he can build the website. He muddles his way through HTML documentation to create his first, and particularly ugly website 20 years ago. When he turned 16, he started working on better applications as well as learned PHP. How did you go from PHP to Ruby? As Jordan got further and further, he worked a lot in the energy sector, including Chevron and Oxy. This sort of work became dull and boring for him. He knew that there were other things out there that would be better. He started learning Ruby and fell in love with it. He mentions that working with Ruby helped him to love coming into work. Jordan now works almost exclusively in Ruby on Rails now. What have you done in Ruby? Jordan talks about switching all of his work over to Ruby, including doing work for Quip, the toothbrush service. He has also done work for EventBrite on one of their Micro Services. He soon after quit his work to start devcamp.com and launch his own learning platform. He says that he learns best by teaching so he started to create courses, usually for himself. He self-published on platforms like Udemy, but was also hired to create courses for FlatIron School in New York. His time was spent less in development and more in creating courses. What makes the DevCamp.com different? What was your inspiration? As a developer and having his own consulting shop, he recognized that camps weren’t teaching certain things like algorithms and even soft skills like project management and estimation. He also wanted to include other things like machine learning. Jordan felt strong on what he felt a true job centric curriculum should be focused on. Uniquely, Jordan has created a strong network to hiring partners. Instead of just building a course, they build outlines for a certain topic and then has the hiring partners and network to help create a profile for the best candidate for hire. Then creating the workshop around those requests. A major element that makes Jordan’s Devcamp.com stand out is that they are one of the only accredited bootcamps out there. Devcamp also uniquely has a 2 year pathway mapped out similar to a university computer science curriculum. Universities have partnered with devcamp.com because the curriculum lose a little bit faster than the traditional taught curriculum. Students are getting hired a bit faster because they are learning more relevant information. Jordan states that the student’s success is also Devcamp.com’s success. What are the skills people need to actually get a job? What makes a great developer is problem solving. Problem solving is the most important. If a person can dissect a challenge and come up with a plan, it’s very valuable. There is a problem solving course that presents a number of challenges where students learn to problem solve, not even using code. Taking a practical approach to give a sense a real world relevance and a mental framework for problem solving. Do you feel like your main contribution was teaching? Jordan mentions that he tries to contribute to open source and that he has made a few Ruby Gems but his time is limited. He discovered that even when he was making good money developing, he didn’t feel like he was making a huge difference in the world. He talks about watching students who came from working minimum wage jobs leave the camp they started working very hard and making 50 to 60 grand a year. The camp changed their lives. Charles talks about how he relates with the podcast. People have come to him with similar stories of having enough confidence to change their careers after listening to the podcasts. What are you working on now? Anything new? Jordan talks about how most of his time is developing new ‘Products’ for Devcamp. Each day he tries to add a few new features. One of the big plans is to start including machine learning into the curriculum. He talks about how when he adds features, he tries to use those features to teach and to create a relevant real world example. He finds that most students don’t like abstract thought patterns. Are you doing that with Ruby? Jordan lets us know that yes some of the machine learning stuff he is working on is with Ruby. Interestingly enough, he spent time at the Rails Conf and went to every machine learning talk there. Every single machine learning talk was on Python. He mentions that “H.H’s” (David Heinemeier Hansson) keynote talk was on using the right tools. It’s hard to compete with the large number of libraries that Python has on machine learning. Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Iot Charles suggests that artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and Iot are really where technology is heading. Jordan and Charles talk about how they all three interplay together to enhance our lives. adjunctSensors from an Iot device uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to make decisions that then tie into how we experience reality. Charles mentions that he often tries to convince people that their phones are already supplementing our lives in a way that makes it augmented reality. Machine learning seems to be the glue that holds it all together. Picks Jordan Devcamp
Bottega
Tim and Ruby Topaz Charles Ruby Dev Summit
Wordpress theme - Summit
Ruby Rogues Parley
Meetup.com Links Bottega
Devcamp.com
Twitter
GitHub
Crondose blog

My Ruby Story with Charles Max Wood
This week’s episode is a bit different. Charles Max Wood interviews… Charles Max Wood! Hear a bit about how Charles’ grandfather inspired him towards his career in programing, how handling technical support for Mozy somehow led him to writing Ruby code, and hear a bit about what he is working on now! Stay tuned. How did you get into Programming?
Charles talks about remembering some of his first programming exposure as far back as second grade. He talks about programming the iconic turtle to move around on the screen and draw shapes. Later on he had more experience in a particular Math class in high school, this time Pascal, then of course the TI-85. Inspired by his Grandfather
Charles gives a bit of a background story on his inspiration for taking electronics classes in school, his Grandfather. His Grandfather was an inventor that created various inventions, including tools used in the manufacturing of rocket boosters for the NASA Space Shuttle. Charles became very interested in electronics and took his first electronic class. Electrical engineering in College
Charles then attended Brigam Young University majoring in Electrical Engineering, giving him even further chances to experience programming. To Charles, programming seemed fun but didn’t feel serious enough to hold weight as his career. His interest grew in computers. He eventually switches to Computer Engineering and graduates, also picking up a job in the office of information technology at BYU. Programming gets more serious
Charles talks about how programming in college tended to lean towards games and fun projects, and it wasn’t until after college that the projects that he got involved with felt as if the work he was doing meant something. From building a system to help college students find apartments that fit their needs, to Bash scripts that made some of the IT updates at BYU faster and safer. His first job with Ruby on Rails
Charles then lands a job with Mozy, the popular online backup service. Mozy’s systems were all running with Ruby on Rails and Charles worked as Technical Support. Mozy gets publicity in The Wall Street Journal, increasing the Technical Support workload. Charles then writes a Ruby on Rails system that created a smoother flow when cycling through emails. He soon added extra features like canned responses and a way to measure how often canned responses were sent as a way to highlight any particular issues Mozy was having. Shifting into Podcasting
Charles talks about switching from a Management position to a developer track and working with a man name Don, who had an original iPod and listened to podcasts. Introducing him to Rails Envy, a podcast by Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack. After emailing Gregg, to Charles’ surprise he responds and encourages him to start his own podcast. Charles talks about how he feels his main contribution to the Ruby community is his podcast. Since then he has had a chance to interview some really influential people, including David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Outside of the podcast, Charles adds that he has also taken over Teach Me To Code and has contributed a few open source libraries, one connecting to project HoneyPot, as well as contributing indirectly through his other podcast work including JavaScript Jabber, and Adventures in Angular. What are you working on now?
Charles talks about hoping to get back into writing open source code and even starting a project. Charles spends most of his time doing ‘businessy’ stuff for the podcast as well as the conferences, currently working on putting together a Ruby Dev Summit. Charles talks about a few new podcast shows he is working on, including bringing some requested content like web application security, React, and Elixir. Charles talks a bit about other things he is involved in at home and creating systems to help him manage his busy workload. Picks
Electro-Voice RE20 Microphone
Behringer Xenyx 802
Roland EDIROL R-09
ZOOM H6
Audio Technica 2100
GetACoderJob.com Charles’ Links
Devchat.tv
Charles’ Twitter
Devchat.tv’s Twitter
Charles GitHub
[email protected]

Today's episode features the Ruby Story of Jamis Buck. James guested on episode 268, where he talked about Mazes for Programmers. For 9 years, he worked at 37Signals as Software Developer. How did he get into programming, and what is he currently up to? Tune in!

Tune in as Charles Max Wood interviews Fabio Akita! Fabio has been working on Ruby for more than 10 years. He also blogs about it, and participates in Ruby Conf and in the programming community in Brazil. He appeared on episode 285, where talked about the conference and the community. Learn more about his journey and contributions in programming.

On today's episode, Charles Max Wood interviews Derrick Reimer. Derrick is the co-founder of Drip, an email marketing automation platform that's designed for startups and consultants. He appeared on episode 254, and talked about Building/Scaling a Rails Saas App. It's interesting to know how Derrick got into programming. Tune in!