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

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

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

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

– Chuck: How many kids do you have?

– Guest: I have 2 kids.

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

– Guest: I will be happy to.

– Chuck:

– 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!

– 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

– Chuck: What aspect in music are you into?

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

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

– 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.

– 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.

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

– Guest: Yes programming has come a long way.

– 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.

– 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.

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

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

– 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.

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

– 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.

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

– 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.

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

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

– 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.

– 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.

– 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

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

– 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!

– Chuck: Sounds like a movie plot to me!

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

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

– Chuck: Let’s talk about PaperCall?

– 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.

– Guest & Chuck talking about saving time.

– Chuck: What are you doing now?

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

– Chuck: How did you get into GO?

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

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

– 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.

– Guest.

– Chuck: Picks!

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