Guest: Mark Bates

This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Mark Bates who is a consultant, trainer, entrepreneur, co-founder of PaperCall, and an author! Chuck and Mark talk about PaperCall, GO, Ruby, JavaScript, and helping others within the community. Check out today’s episode to hear more!

0:00 – Get A Coder Job!

0:59 – Chuck: Hi! I saw we were on Episode 198! We talked about Ruby and different communities.

1:25 – Guest: Yes, we were talking about the conference we were trying to start, which never took-off!

1:50 – Chuck: You talked about how you are working with GO now. You are an author, too!

2:06 – Guest: That came out in 2009. My 2nd son was born the day before that went to print.

2:42 – Chuck: How many kids do you have?

2:47 – Guest: I have 2 kids.

3:00 – Chuck: Happy Birthday buddy! Let’s talk about your journey into and out of Ruby!

3:15 – Guest: I will be happy to.

3:23 – Chuck:

3:27 – 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!

4:20 – 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

5:10 – Chuck: What aspect in music are you into?

5:14 – Guest: I am a singer/songwriter, and yes into guitar.

5:57 – Chuck: Yeah, they used to have jam sections at conferences.

6:37 – 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.

7:25 – 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.

8:57 – Chuck: You don’t even have to generate a JavaScript project with that – can I find the template and can I go?

9:14 – Guest: Yes programming has come a long way.

9:22 – 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.

9:52 – 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.

Guest: I do a Google search that will give me something that is most recent. There is no reason to have to dig through material that isn’t relevant anymore.

Guest: I used NOTEPAD to write websites.

11:29 – Chuck: Yes, and then Notepad plus, plus!

11:39 – Guest: Those days are gone. If you want to build a website you go to a company that does that now. 

12:55 – 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.

13:56 – Chuck: Talking about how complicated the Web is getting. What led you to Ruby on Rails?

14:12 – 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.

I didn’t like debugging XML – and it wasn’t fun. I was refiguring out my career. Everything at the time was XML and more XML! I didn’t want to be in that world. I quit developing completely for 2 years. I worked as an internship in a recording studio for a while. I got to work with a lot of great people, but there was a lack of money and lack of general employment. We wanted to have kids and at the end of 2005 a friend mentioned Ruby on Rails. He told me that it’s NOT Java and that I would love it. I installed it and found an old cookbook tutorial and immediately I said: THAT’s what I want programming to be. When did you pick up Ruby on Rails?

18:14 – Chuck: I picked it up when I worked for...and I was doing Q&A customer service.

19:05 – 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.

20:40 – Chuck: What have you done in Ruby that you are particularly proud of?

20:50 – Guest: Most proud running Boston RB. We had so many people show up!

22:49 – 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.

23:31 – 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.

24:31 – 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

25:23 – Guest: Making a living off of helping people is a great feeling!

25:44 – 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!

28:18 – Chuck: Sounds like a movie plot to me!

28:25 – Guest: Oh no – that’s not a good movie idea!

28:50 – Chuck and Guest go back-and-forth with a pretend movie: who would play you?

29:15 – Chuck: Let’s talk about PaperCall?

29:23 – 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.

31:45 – Guest & Chuck talking about saving time.

32:37 – Chuck: What are you doing now?

32:42 – Guest: Yeah, I get to go around and help engineers and open source exclusively.

33:48 – Chuck: How did you get into GO?

33:53 – Guest: In about 2012 I started looking into GO.

36:28 – Guest: What you see is what you get in GO, which is what I like!

39:13 – 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.

40:30 – Guest.

42:00 – Chuck: Picks!

42:06 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!

END – CacheFly

Chuck

Mark