Larry has 15 years' experience in the military under his belt, and is still training as a software developer. We talk about the up-and-coming developer experience, before his first job and what they're looking for. We also talk about social change, and how different the software world is from most of the real world. A little psychology, a little social science, a certain amount of ethics... A great conversation, all told. Larry is also dyslexic, and we talk about how he handles that, and how it's changed all those other things we talk about. For show notes and links, see: http://justtheusefulb ..read more

We talk about how Craig got started, of course, and about buzzwords and how he did his early job hunting. We talk a *lot* about Ruby performance - who's who, what matters, what's annoying. We veer a bit into how Pina Coladas shouldn't use dark rum (heresy!) and about the example of Centaur Chess, and how it related to other human/computer interactions. For show notes and links, see: http://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/craig-petterson-buzzwords-pina-coladas-and-centaur-chess ..read more

This episode is with me, my wife Krissy and Akien McIain, a mutual friend who is also a very senior test automation engineer. When two old engineers get together to talk, you can always expect a lot of war stories... But more importantly, a lot of this is a compare/contrast between developers, QA and test automation. What's similar? What's different? How do the two groups related to each other on the job? And when you get outside 'normal' software dev jobs, the career path is less clear. How do you prepare for something when there's not a degree program? What does the path through that career ..read more

I barely know how to summarise this one. It's one of my favourites. Andrew is from dot-NET rather than Ruby. He was raised by missionaries, and is thus extremely literate about cultures and how to introduce yourself into a new one. He sees a lot of what I see from a very enlightened outsider's perspective. Which is like catnip to me, just so we're clear. We talk about how often learning programming *skill* is a side effect of learning programming *culture*. Also about affordances - what particular languages, cultures and tools encourage, not just what they enable. Powerful stuff. For show note ..read more

Shai Schechter, co-founder of RightMessage, has been hustling since he was 11. He believes that what's practical is very different for different people. If you see a task through a particular lens (e.g. tech) then that's the way you should do it. Do what comes naturally. For show notes: https://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/shai-schechter ..read more

Caitlyn didn't want to go back and get a degree "at my age", but went to Thinkful to learn to be a full-stack software engineer, which is "like being paid to go to school and make cool things forever." It's hard to tell what to focus on when there's so much to learn. "It used different muscles in my brain," she says, as she "learn[ed] to work from a place of frustration." And in the end, "it's either a good time or a good story!" For show notes and links, see: http://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/caitlyn-greffly-paid-to-go-to-school-and-make-cool-things-forever ..read more

Jennifer is an early-career cloud engineer. We talk about how she got into software development without having experience before university, and what that meant about picking up the unspoken cultural norms. We also talk about the dark academic aesthetic and how she improves at all of this. For show notes and links, see: https://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/jennifer-tran-coding-paradigms-the-satisfaction-of-studying-and-unspoken-cultural-norms ..read more

I met John Pavan early in his career, after he'd just made the transition from nuclear physics to full-time computer programming. We caught up on how C++ is doing and how he's doing in it. We also talked about what he looks for in a software hire, and handling legacy code. For show notes and links, see: http://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/john-pavan-coming-to-programming-from-nuclear-physics-and-some-vagaries-of-c ..read more

Chris Seaton, founder of TruffleRuby, talks with me about getting a computer science Ph.D, how learning compilers is necessarily like an old-style apprenticeship, and a near-the-metal view of complex algorithms for computation. For show notes and links see: For show notes, links and comments see https://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/chris-seaton-on-phds-and-software-apprenticeships ..read more

Jared and I talk about his journey through all sorts of programming platforms, from the Commodore 128, through PHP to Ruby and onward. He talks about Object Oriented programming, Rails service objects and why he doesn't like classes that are just functions. He talks about how GitHub brings a little of the benefits of pair programming to the single-programmer experience. We even talk a little language performance, and how machine learning code looks weirdly like graphics and GPGPU. For show notes, links and comments see https://justtheusefulbits.com/jtub/jared-white-the-trip-from-php-to-ruby ..read more