My Ruby Story

Interviews with people, contributors, programmers, authors, and other builders in the Ruby Community

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MRS 037: Derek Prior

Guests :

Derek Prior

Hosts :

Charles Max Wood

Published : Mar 28, 2018

Duration : 43 Minutes

Show Notes

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Derek Prior

This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Derek Prior. Derek speaks at conferences more often and is now a development director at Thought Bot. He first got into programming when was 7 or 8 when he got an Apple IIGS for Christmas and he started messing around with writing basic code. This really got him interested in how video games and systems worked behind the scenes and led to his interest in programming. In high school, he took programming classes and found he was actually good at it and decided to pursue programming in college. Once he was hired at Thought Bot, his developing skills really took off and he has been there for almost five years now.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Derek intro
Being a good developer doesn’t mean you’re a good developer manager
How did you first get into programming?
Apple IIGS as first computer
Prodigy and AOL
Visual Basic
Basic and Pascal
How did you get into being a full-time developer?
IBM and Microsoft internships in college
Learned Java in college
How did you find Ruby?
Ruby on Rails
How he found Thought Bot
Development skills took off at Thought Bot
Likes to stay at a job for a long time
How do you evaluate companies to see if you want to work there?
How do you create the right environment at work?
The importance of empowering employees
Use company values to decide upon tough decisions
And much, much more!

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MRS 037: Derek Prior

Show Notes