Omar Rayward attended one of the first ever coding bootcamp cohorts, now he's a Senior Staff Software Engineer. Oz and Charlie connect with Omar about his study habits, motivation, and whatever else it takes to keep up his consistent learning habits.

Shownotes:

• How to be consistent (Oz's recent article, featuring Omar!)

Charlie's unexpected packet loss devolves into a live Oz networking lesson.

* Matt's (my) traceroute
* How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer Knocked Large Parts of the Internet Offline Today
* Border Gateway Protocol
* Christmas Day Bug on ARPANET (grep for Christmas in 1973 section)
* Great horned owl

Oz and Charlie catch up with Felix Tripier - now a Senior Staff Software Engineer at quantum computing company IonQ - for the first time in three years! Felix was our first guest on Escaping Web - a double high school and college dropout who become a self-taught web developer and is now a quantum computing engineer - so it only made sense for him to be our first guest on The CS Primer Show.

We discuss Felix's path to staff engineer, the engineering manager vs. staff engineer career choices, staff engineering archetypes, building software for and working with scientists, the movie Grave of the Fireflies, the book When We Cease To Understand The World, and, of course, reference an apt XKCD comic.

Is there a benefit to figuring things out the hard way? Why learn to read disassembly if you can just ask Chat GPT. We talk about this, as well as somehow the Piet programming language and much more.

• Piet programming language

We kick off The CS Primer Show with a conversation prompted by our mutual love of "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming. This is an essay that Oz frequently recommends to software engineers who would like to increase their impact. Be sure to watch the talk or read the transcript of Hamming's talk!

- You and Your Research (transcript)
- You and Your Research (video)
- Unix: A History and a Memoir
- CS Primer
- Bloom's 2 sigma problem
- Hoel on aristocratic tutoring
- Auren on insiders vs outsiders
- Charlie's project to write 52 short stories in a year
- Escaping Web: Oz and Charlie's previous engineering interview podcast
- American Prometheus (Oppenheimer biography)