#012 – Learning Compilers with Cartoons with Vaidehi Joshi

Early in Dan’s career, he saw the clear need for companies to solve technical and cultural challenges around automated testing.  He made this challenge his focus. Dan has been in roles ranging from quality engineer, test automation lead, and director of quality engineering. His current role is at Salesforce as a principal engineer focusing on testing frameworks and enabling teams to build quality into the product. In this episode, Dan Forkosh shares about his journey transforming organizations from manual to automated testing and discusses some of the cultural hurdles. Where to Find Dan Forkosh On the web: danielforkosh.com On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielforkosh Book Recommendations This week’s audiobook recommendations are Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work and What Does by Susan Fowler and Brief, Make a Bigger Impact By Saying Less by Joseph McCormack.  Get your free audiobook by visiting ardentdev.com/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast. Follow @ardentdev Music by Nazar Rybak and Alvaro Angeloro from HookSounds.com. The post #013 – Test Automation Culture with Daniel Forkosh appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

3/6/18 • 37:28

Vaidehi Joshi started BaseCS to document her self-guided journey into computer science. It turned into a much-loved blog, podcast, and video series. Vaidehi is an engineer at Tilde, in Portland, Oregon, where she works on Skylight (a smart profiler for Ruby and Rails applications). She enjoys building and breaking code, but loves creating empathetic engineering teams a whole lot more. In her spare time, she runs basecs, a weekly writing series that explores the fundamentals of computer science, and is co-host of the Base.cs Podcast. In this episode, Vaidehi shares about her background as a writer and educator, the origins of BaseCS, and how BaseCS is making computer science concepts accessible to a broader audience. Where to Find Vaidehi Joshi @vaidehijoshi on Twitter BaseCS blog series on Medium BaseCS podcast BaseCS video series TEDx talk Book Recommendations This week’s audiobook recommendations are The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars by Patrick Lencioni. Get your free audiobook by visiting ardentdev.com/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast. Follow @ardentdev Music by Nazar Rybak and Alvaro Angeloro from HookSounds.com. The post #012 – Learning Compilers with Cartoons with Vaidehi Joshi appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

2/27/18 • 40:13

April Wensel, founder of Compassionate Coding, is a veteran software engineer and technical leader whose varied career spans such fields as education, research, healthcare, and entertainment. She has also mentored and led workshops with diversity-focused organizations like Hackbright Academy and Black Girls Code. In this episode, April talks about her past as a jerk programmer, how she came to recognize that her behavior was problematic, and why she started Compassionate Coding to help teams deliver better products more effectively. We were inspired to invite April on the podcast after reading her fantastic article Confessions of a Recovering Jerk Programmer. Where to Find April Wensel @aprilwensel and @compassioncode on Twitter. On the web at https://compassionatecoding.com/. Book Recommendation This week’s audiobook recommendation is Awakening Compassion at Work: The Quiet Power that Elevates People and Organizations. Get your free audiobook by visiting ardentdev.com/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast. Follow @ardentdev Music by Nazar Rybak and Alvaro Angeloro from HookSounds.com. The post #011 – Jerk Programmer to Compassionate Coder with April Wensel appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

2/20/18 • 24:27

Luke Ball is a product leader at Salesforce. After studying computer science in school, Luke started his career in front-end coding and UX. He’s worked as a consultant, an independent contractor, employee #1 at a startup, and, for the last eight years, as a product and UX manager at Salesforce. At Salesforce, he was on the original Chatter team and has worked in various capacities on Search, Einstein, and Mobile. For the last four and a half years, he worked on Social Studio, Salesforce’s platform for social media management. We’ve all heard the analogy of changing the engine while still flying the plane. In this episode, Luke Ball shares his insights and experiences reimagining an established software product. We discuss information gathering, painting a vision for the future, getting buy-in, managing expectations, and more. A must-listen for anyone working on evolving existing software products. Where to Find Luke Ball At lukeball.com @holidomelarry on Twitter Book Recommendation This week’s audiobook recommendation is The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees) by Patrick M. Lencioni. Get your free audiobook by visiting ardentdev.com/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast. Follow @ardentdev Music by Nazar Rybak and Alvaro Angeloro from HookSounds.com. The post #010 – Reimagining Your Product with Luke Ball appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

2/13/18 • 22:43

Gerry O’Brien is a Senior Content Development Manager at Microsoft Learning with a focus on software development and database platforms. He has over 18 years of industry experience in various roles including software development, consulting, and training. Gerry holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, Mobile Development degree and has experience with C#, C++, Visual Basic, Java, Objective-C, Swift, iOS Development, Android Development, and more. In this episode, Derek and Ron reconnect with their old teammate, who went from HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) professional in small town Canada to content and curriculum guru at Microsoft Learning in Seattle. Gerry shares the journey that brought him to Microsoft, what he loves about working at the tech giant, and some of the interesting things Microsoft Learning is doing. Where to Find Gerry O’Brien @gerryob on Twitter Book Recommendation This week’s audiobook recommendation is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Get your free audiobook by visiting ardentdev.com/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast. Follow @ardentdev Music by Nazar Rybak and Alvaro Angeloro from HookSounds.com. The post #009 – Small Town to Tech Giant with Gerry O’Brien appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

2/6/18 • 28:14

Adam Englander is a software architect with a passion for developing secure and maintainable software. He is the founder of PHP Vegas and truly loves supporting the local and global developer communities. In this episode, Derek and Ron chat with Adam Englander about the basics of using things like fingerprints and facial recognition as authentication factors. Adam shares some of the potential risks and how to best think about using biometrics as part of a multi-factor authentication solution. Where to find Adam Englander @adam_englander on Twitter On the web at https://www.iovation.com/ Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter. Book Recommendation This week’s audiobook recommendation is The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player: Becoming the Kind of Person Every Team Wants by John C. Maxwell. Get your free audiobook by visiting ardentdev.com/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast. Follow @ardentdev Music by Nazar Rybak and Alvaro Angeloro from HookSounds.com. The post #008 – Fingerprints Are Forever: Biometric Factors for Authentication with Adam Englander appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

1/30/18 • 26:55

Mike Hrycyk has been trapped in the world of quality since he first did user acceptance testing 19 years ago. He believes in creating a culture of quality throughout software production and tries hard to create teams that hold this ideal and advocate it to the rest of their workmates. He has worked many roles, but always returning to testing. Mike is currently the Director of Quality for PQA Testing. In this episode, Derek and Ron chat with Mike Hrycyk about his experience using a regression testing team to augment feature teams, handling the testing regression cycle while the feature teams (developers and testers) do new development. He makes a compelling case and his story of success is well worth the listen. Where to find Mike Hrycyk @qaisdoes on Twitter On the web at qaisdoes.com Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter. Follow @ardentdev Transcript Ron: We are joined today with Mike Hrycyk who has been trapped in the world of quality since he first hit his user acceptance testing 19 years ago. He has survived all the different levels, and a wide spectrum of technologies and environments to become the quality dynamo that he is today. Mike believes in creating a culture of quality through software production and tries hard to create teams that hold this ideal and advocate it to the rest of their workmates. Mike’s currently the director of quality for PQA Testing but has previously worked in social media management, parking, manufacturing Web photo retail music delivery kiosks and railroad. So welcome to the show, Mike Mike: Thank you. Glad to be here. Derek: It’s good to have you Mike. Ron: Glad to have you. Now you just finished up at a conference. We thought we’d have you on to talk a little bit about your first talk that you gave there are. Augmenting the gentle team, a testing success story. Could you give us started on that topic, Mike. Mike: Well sure, for sure. So Agile for me is a bit of a passion, I think. I really believe in the power of Agile. But one of the things that I’ve learned in working with people who do Agile is that when when people self teach or when they have bad coaches people seem to believe that there’s a right way to do Agile, that there’s one way to do Agile and they go out and they find a how to guide for how to do Agile and it teaches you how to implement it. But the problem with that is that every situation is incredibly different and that Agile isn’t really set up to be a how to guide it’s set up. It has a manifesto, it’s a set of concepts and it’s something that everyone who adopts it has to figure out how to do it right. And so I had a project that we did with one of our clients so, we’re testing as a service company. And we got involved with one of our clients where we did an assessment and helped them figure out what they needed to to be successful and some of the work they were doing. And one of the things that that we were looking at with them was is what they’re doing, is it doing Agile wrong, is it doing it right? And I have this personal mission to make sure that no one believes that you’re doing Agile wrong as a term that you can hear. I’m not sure if you guys are familiar with the concept but when I hear that it just makes me angry because Agile is an iterative approach to everything and it’s the way that there’s no way that it needs to be done. You’re doing it right, if it’s working for you. And so this talk that I put together is sort of a case study from a project where we did take and went way off the standard realm of Agile and did it our own way. And I wanted I talk about how we did it what the problems were and what the success was to help people see that doing Agile your own way is probably the best path to success. That makes sense? Ron: Absolutely. It’s an interesting topic because as you go from company to company and do different assignments there you see Agile implemented in different ways. And I think if you talk to the folks that are involved in projects they would actually give you a slightly different slant which I think is aspirates this topic of are we doing it right. Because I.T. is often, you know years ago, there’s a right and wrong way if you will, right there seems. But this seems somewhat fluid. I think people are having a hard time knowing you know are we doing well or are we doing it right? Mike: Well and for someone who grew up in Waterfall who’s spent years having lists of things that you need to do to do things properly Agile so different from that. And I think that’s one of the reasons that some people and I hesitate to call people old timers but if that’s your mindset maybe that’s the right way to say it. You get stuck in that mindset and Agile has too much change, it’s just too fluid and it’s difficult for you to go into that new world where you might have to be able to shift every two weeks, you might have to be able to shift the way you’re doing things because you’re supposed to be iterating to make things better. Mike: So the clients I won’t name names but the client is a Canadian client that produces a retail management solution or an RMS for mobile phone kiosks. So when you go into a mobile phone place in a mall or wherever you go and you buy a phone and probably not the ones that are actually branded Fido or Bell or whatever, probably one of the other ones although they sell to the carriers as well. But when you go into one of those and you buy a phone, one of the things that they need to do is they not only have to track the purchase of the phone. They also have to set up provisioning for the phone so that when you walk out of that kiosk that you have a phone that is connected to the carrier and that does what it needs to do. So they produce software that takes care of that, takes care of the selling and takes care of that. And they’ve also extended it and tried to make it an option that will sell and take care of all of the needs of that client. So it also takes care of employment stuff, it takes care of inventory, it takes care of reporting and tries to take care of all things. And really what end that ends up being is it ends up being a very very complex system so anyone who’s worked in an ERP knows that that it’s like an octopus only not eight arms, like a million arms that that thread through all different things. And so there’s a lot of integration points for that. And then. So they were having some problems with one of their end clients which is what I term one of our clients who is working with someone else down the line. We call that the end client sort of like end user and when they work with an end client that end client was a name of one of the major carriers in the U.S. and they did 40 percent of the business for my client. So what they did is they had a lot of clout in conversations about features and things and that end client had 15 other vendors delivering solutions that all built together into integrated system that made them successful. Ron: So it’s an octopus of octopuses. Mike: Yeah yeah every aka arm had other octopuses living off in this kind of mutated. What that meant though was that that the SIT testing,the integrated testing environment system integration environment was very necessary and complex because you couldn’t test on your own box you can’t test for what’s going...

1/23/18 • 28:04

Chloe Condon, a former musical theatre actress and Hackbright Academy graduate, is a Developer Evangelist at Sentry. Perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet who has been in “Hairspray”, “Xanadu”, and “Jerry Springer: the Opera,” she is passionate about bringing people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face, yes, she’s the young woman giving the awkward thumbs up in the “What It’s Like to be a Woman at a Tech Conference” article (which she also wrote). A quick Google search of her will provide you with getting started with Docker videos, theatre reviews, tech blogs, and videos of her singing—enjoy! In this episode, Derek and Ron chat with Chloe about her role as a developer evangelist as well as her background in musical theatre and what insights can be gleaned from comparing and contrasting tech and theatre as industries. Chloe also shares a high-level overview of Sentry, the cross-platform crash reporting and aggregation platform. Where to find Chloe Condon @ChloeCondon on Twitter On the web at https://medium.com/@chloecondon Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter. Follow @ardentdev Transcript Ron: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast. I’m Ron Smith. Derek: And I’m Derek Hatchard. Today we’re talking with Chloe Condon. Chloe is a former musical theater actress and Hackbright Academy graduate and she is now a developer evangelist at Sentry. She is perhaps the only engineer you’ll meet. I think the only one that I know who has been in Hairspray is Xanadu and Jerry Spinger the opera. She is passionate about bring people with non-traditional backgrounds into the world of tech. If you’re trying to place her face she is the woman giving the thumbs up in the what it’s like to be a woman at a tech conference article, which she wrote. I found that on Medium and there might be other places, Chloe can correct me in a second. And a quick google search for her will tell you that she has a series of getting started with docker videos. You find some theater reviews that she’s on, tech blogs and I think the hilarious videos of her singing after. So Chloe welcome to the show. Chloe: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Derek: So Chloe, you’re a developer evangelist at a company called Sentry and some of us have bumped into plenty of developer evangelists in our time. But for those listening who don’t really know what that role is. Could you really unpack it for us? What is it? What do your days look like? Tell us a little bit about that experience is like. Chloe: Sure, so it’s kind of funny. Usually when I tell people who aren’t familiar with the role they say “Oh is that a religious thing”? And my answer is usually well in a sense. But basically I call myself an extroverted engineer. The title I go by is developer evangelist. Other people go by DevRel, developer advocate. There’s a lot of different flavors and varieties of us. So personally I got into the evangelism space because I have a non-traditional background. I come from theater world. And when we were presenting our projects at Hackbright I discovered pretty quickly like oh wow nobody likes to do public speaking. This is very interesting. So that’s kind of part of what I do. So oftentimes I will go to conferences and I will speak about various thought leadership topics. Right now I’m doing a lot of stuff around the error blogging you know metrics space, in my previous role I did a lot of Docker evangelism. So it’s a combination of a couple of things, it’s speaking, it’s writing content. So a lot of the times and you see tutorials or walkthroughs on different websites that’s often made by me and our content person. Doing everything from case studies to writing code examples for different integrations and features that we have. I’m organizing our meetup that’s going to be a monthly meet up starting in January. So it really depends what I like about it a lot is my role changes every single day. Just looking at my calendar next week I’m like breaking it down and seeing OK I’m writing this thought leadership blog and then all day Thursday we’re filming all around the city for our meet up, we’re doing a promotional video for our meet up. We just published The 12 Days of integrations gif blog posts where we call ourselves very gif positive here at Sentry every new employee gets a welcome gif. e featured all of our integrations over the 12 days leading to the holidays which involved having our different engineers hold up different ornaments with the logos of our integrations on them. So there are some really fun kind of theatrical aspects of my role. But a lot of it requires this pretty deep understanding of technology and our product and being able to code. So I definitely went in more non-traditional route as a first role in these software engineering role or world, I should say. But I felt that it very much aligned with with my past. So yeah now I’m now I’m here. Derek: So the very first developer evangelist I ever met was a guy at Microsoft, years and years ago. And at the time he didn’t even he wouldn’t use, even though that was his job title he wouldn’t use the term developer evangelist when he was going out around Canada because everyone would look at him like What are you talking about? What does that even? But what’s interesting is that there is. I mean there is a fair bit of showmanship involved in it so I can see how such a good fit given that you have a performance background I think that’s really cool. Do you run into the misconception that because you’re a developer evangelist or you work in developer relations or developer marketing that you know you’re not technical or you’re not a real engineer. Do you run into that bias? Chloe: You know I think a lot of it is mental for me since I am in a sense still very junior because I only graduated from my bootcamp a year ago. No one’s ever blatantly said that to me but I think the voices in my head say that. I usually do not recommend to the bootcamp grads to jump right into evangelism just because I think it’s very valuable to get the time in the trenches and get that time to really understand the pain points and the workflows of engineers. So I really had to put it on myself my first year to make sure that I was coding everyday that I was doing some sort of technology be that writing about it or blogging about it. Obviously in my last role it was very Docker focused and now I’m learning all about this new space of you know error tracking and metrics and logging. So I think that a lot of it is mental and imposter syndrome. There’s always so much to learn. With Sentry in particular, we support basically every language. So my bootcamp, the curriculum was mostly python and Javascript. So when I go to something like Rubyconf or if I go to something like php conference I obviously know how to code and I can build my own. But I haven’t touched a lot of php so a lot of that is I spend a lot of my free time kind of dabbling in those languages. Use a lot of resources like code school and teen treehouse. But yeah I would say there are definitely evangelists out there who are very technical. My role sits on the marketing team...

1/16/18 • 24:54

Kevin Grossnicklaus is an old school developer who lives in St. Louis, MO and runs a great team of 7 developers at his company ArchitectNow. At ArchitectNow, he and his team build apps targeting a variety of platforms ranging from web to desktop to mobile. When not building apps for customers, Kevin can be found traveling, chicken pickin’ on his Telecaster, or tracking his expanding amount of grey hair thanks to his three teenage daughters. He’s also still holding out for a second season of Firefly. Kevin is also the co-author of Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2017. In this episode, Derek Hatchard and Ron Smith join Kevin in reminiscing about early programming experiences on personal computers from the 80s and discuss why curiosity and a desire to learn are so important for software professionals. In November 2017, Kevin wrote the blog post “A Touch of Applesoft Basic” about his early programming experiences and introducing his 80s and 90s tech to younger software developers. Check it out for photos of the things Kevin talks about in this episode of Ardent Development. Where to find Kevin Grossnicklaus @kvgros on Twitter On the web at http://architectnow.net/blog/ In print at Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2017 Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter. Follow @ardentdev Transcript Derek: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast. I’m Derek. And today Ron and I are on with Kevin Grossnicklaus. Did I say that right, Kevin? Kevin: You did, it’s good enough. Derek: Alright, good enough. Kevin is an old school developer who lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Say it the right way. And runs a great team of seven developers at his company ArchitectNow. At ArchitectNow they build apps targeting a variety of platforms ranging from web to desktop to mobile. When not building apps, Kevin can be found traveling, chicken pickin’ on his Telecaster or tracking his expanding amount of grey hairs thanks to his three teenage daughters. And he’s still holding out for a second season of Firefly. And I’m right there with you. Right there with you. For those of us who are in Canada which is where Ron and I, you might need to explain what chicken pickin’ is. Kevin: Oh I’m a country guitar player. So American country music old school country music. I’m a Merle Haggard / Johnny Cash type guitar player. I’ve been doing it a long time. Derek: Alright. So, Kevin, I saw the blog post that you wrote. It really resonated with me and you were going back looking at sort of how you got into programming stuff that you used to work on. Derek: And I think it all sprung from building a bit of a museum in your new office. You want to give us a little bit of the backstory for that blog post. Kevin: Sure. As you said it really it was thanks to the power of eBay. I was putting some technology in a new office we had built and buying some things that I had owned a few old, my original Nintendo and an original game cube and things like that that my wife wanted me to get out of the house. So I decided these would be a clever thing to put on the shelf at the office and talk about share with some of my younger developers. You know the things that I grew up playing or enjoyed back in the day and they’ll get a little more use than they are sitting boxes in the basement. In doing that it got me thinking about you know growing up back in the mid 80s when I when I started programming I was 12 years old. My parents bought me an apple II GS and I have been a programmer ever since the day I got the computer so I went on eBay and I kind of wish I still had that computer and I found one and I ordered one and ultimately I had to order 2 and piecemeal a few together that worked and in doing so I went down to my basement and dug up a dusty old box of floppy disks – five and a quarter and three and a half inch disks. Popped them in and it worked. All my old programs that the blog post that you’re talking about is really me looking back at when I was 12 I was in the middle of Nebraska. And that’s a time and a place where not a lot of people had computers. Kevin: There were no we were still using rotary phones and there was no internet in the sense that we have it today. And I as of this recording I’m a whopping 42 years of age. Some people consider that young some people consider that old. Kevin: I’m kind of in that middle age but at 12 years old I’ve got a computer and that computer booted to a blinking cursor. It literally did nothing. It shocked me. I was excited. I was the proud new owner of a shiny new computer and I turned it on and up came a cursor, it did absolutely nothing I dug through the boxes of manuals I said it’s got to be more than this it’s got it. And I was expecting video games and all this fancy stuff to come out of it. Ultimately I had to learn to make it do make make that computer do something on my own. And I found a book that I still treasure very much back in my house. I have a book called Learning to Program in Applesoft Basic so in those days you know you’ve got computers that the availability of software, entertainment was limited. The number of other people that knew how to make them do something was limited. So I wrote a program within the first hour just reading this book just starting at the top and saying hey I must type line 10 print Hello World. Kevin: I don’t think hello world had become a thing back then I can’t remember what I printed. When something came out I was I was hooked. I love that computer and fortunately got another one and oddly enough all my floppy disks, those original programs I wrote that day 30 years ago, still booted and were still there. Kevin: All my old comments, all my old code in Basic, C, and Pascal and assembly language. So I spent the last month or so kind of reminiscing and going back and looking at what I learned and realizing that ever since that day my entire career and everything I’ve done has been based on that book and really growing from there. Derek: It’s really cool. So you wrote comments when you were 12 years old. That’s impressive. Kevin: I spent time trying to this was before you know Google and books and back then the overall surface area of technology was very small I had no peers or mentors to teach me to organize your code. It was just something that I as a young young guy decided it made my life a lot easier. Kevin: So I evolved into it over the years obviously best practices arose and I read books and you know went to college for it and did other things but it was amazing to see in 88 and 89 me organizing a group of subroutines in a non object oriented language and trying to do it a little more clearly than I did before. Ron: So Kevin you are really taking me back. Ron: My first computer was a Commodore 64 and I can remember being down in the basement with my brother and sister and we would put in that game into the floppy disk and it would take, felt like it would take 10 minutes to load a game and we’d be off getting the old hot chocolate. Ron: What do some of your new staf...

1/9/18 • 21:46

Derek Hatchard is an independent writer and software creator, although he took a seven-year hiatus from self-employment to work at Salesforce where he was a developer, software architect, people manager, and product owner. He is a husband and father based in New Brunswick, Canada. Where to Find Derek Hatchard @derekhat on Twitter @derekhat on Medium On the web at derekhat.com Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter. Follow @ardentdev Transcript Ron: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast and today we’re going to be doing something a little different. Normally we would have a guest on the show and we would interview them and we thought that it would be interesting to our listeners to find out a little bit about the hosts. So if you caught the last episode Derek would have interviewed me and for this episode I’m going to be interviewing Derek. It’ll be a brief interview. But just to give you a sense for who are these two guys that are this Ardent Development podcast. So welcome Derek. Derek: Thanks Ron. Ron: So let me kick this off by just asking how you got involved with tech. Derek: Well OK! I’m going to reference an episode that we haven’t published yet. We’re talking to Kevin Grossnicklaus and we talked about programming nostalgia in that one. You were talking in that episode you talk about your Commodore 64 and I asked him about my Commodore VIC 20 and that is actually that’s where it started. I my parents gave me a commodore VIC 20 and I had a book with some basic code in it. I coded some stuff up and I didn’t I didn’t fully understand what I was doing. I didn’t appreciate the power of what I was doing. To me I was like I created a really lame video game. When I went to high school, we had old fashioned typewriters so you took typing on a mechanical keyboard. And then we had computer skills, which was you know basic computer put some floppy drives in the load DOS and learn a little bit of Lotus 1-2-3. When I took that class, I’d gotten through all of the curriculum and so the teacher said Well why don’t you try to learn how to write some code. And so I wrote a blackjack game in Pascal. And that’s how it started. That was the first thing that I really wrote where I was creating some parts of the algorithm that I was really trying to understand what was going on. Even that though didn’t totally seal the deal for me. When I when I was picking what I was going to do after high school and you meet with the guidance counselor. I was applying to schools and one of the schools I applied to you could pick up to three faculties that you wanted to apply to. So I had applied to math or physics like physics and engineering. She said well you might as well put a third one in. Since you there’s a spot there it doesn’t hurt because you might get you know you might get accepted into one or maybe you’ll get a better scholarship offer from one. You can always switch majors later once you get there. So I put computer science in and lo and behold of all of the various acceptance letters and scholarship offers that I got the best one was from the University of New Brunswick. UNB is actually based in Fredericton where I live now. Yeah I had the best scholarship office offer was for computer science as well. I don’t really know what path I want to be on so I’ll go do computer science. I had my moments of doubt when I was in there I ended up actually doing not only a computer science degree but I did a psychology degree in undergrad and currently because I was interested in some aspects of the human computer interaction. Some of the research that was going on at the intersection of those disciplines ended up working a couple of jobs. Technically, I think I only had three jobs in my career the rest of the time I’ve been I’ve been self-employed but I’ve had a couple of jobs went back to grad school. Had this really interesting experience where I went from the consulting world where you would work on things and you had this relatively short feedback cycle in terms of you know your client would accept the work and it would go into production. Or in one case I was actually on a design project. Not sure if it actually ever went into production. I think he may have only ever just designed it. But I found a really hard when I got to grad school. Although I had sort of always fancied myself as an academic. It turns out that I wasn’t excited about the idea of doing research that I published and then waited for a decade for it to make its way into the industry. I was actually really gung-ho to see my work show up in the hands of users as early as possible. Which led me to leave school and my wife was she had her first baby and she was on maternity leave. So here in Canada we had maternity leave policy so as she was home with the baby, I had left school, and we had moved. I said Well you know what I really want to do is I want to build software products so why don’t I start a company and I’ll bootstrap it with consulting work you know start picking up consulting work. And I had so much fun during that early phase, because I was not just writing code for people that I had picked up some work writing. Writing tutorials, wrote magazine articles, I wrote slides for presentations. So basically like making sure all of the technical information was correct and like keynote talks at product launches. Coauthored a book, edited a book that actually was released under a Creative Commons license which was which is pretty fun. So did a bunch of really interesting things and didn’t actually have this really have the traditional school go get a job and write code for 10 years. I almost immediately was into all kinds of different activities surrounding the development space I lots of code during that time but I also recorded videos and recorded audio and I did a lot of writing so it was really fun for me. It’s certainly not traditional by any stretch. Ron: So I’m remembering back to when we met 15 years I don’t know how long ago it was. I think he told me that you were the regional director for Microsoft and I thought to myself “Who is this guy like he’s just young.” You don’t hear of people having that role. And I thought: Man is this guy ever keen that he’s tied in with Microsoft. I think it’s a volunteer position but you got you got to meet some great people from Microsoft and the like. But I was struck by how young you were you know already running a consulting company Regional Director for Microsoft. You had written a book. I was like man this guy’s all in. Anyway it’s a long time ago now but you seem to accomplish more in your youth. Coming out of university than most of the peers that I would have worked with. I remember sitting back and chatting with you. And you said early in your career you were very interested in all these different types of technology so you would study them all. You were one of the guys that enjoyed the debate. Well what piece of technology should we use in this aspect. So again that was different than what most people do because you know so me included. So I went to university and studied C and I worked in C and I worked in Oracle a lot. When I when I first graduated but you had this breadth across the spectrum which was really it was really neat to ...

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