First off, had a session with my protégé last Monday. We had a fun time making an ambient noise soundtrack for a film project. Very satisfying to use Syntə for some sound design work, it did the job well.
Then last week I attended two days at the State of Open Conference (London) in my capacity as an Open Source developer.
One of the highlights was meeting Bruce Perens, who has been a leading light in the development of Open Source as a concept and practice.
He said about how he worked across the corridor from Steve Jobs when he was at Pixar. I asked about Jobs’ fearsome reputation and he joked that it was always fine - as he was the only person at the company who was more obnoxious than Jobs!
He also said something really interesting as career advice to my friend who is getting into coding. He said that you need to be good at two things, one being programming - and one other thing. Because you need to know something that you can teach the computer how to do.
This reflects what I’ve felt for a while, that you need to know another domain outside of computing - unless you are creating tools for eg. software development (which would explain why there are so many!) It was nice to know I was on the right track then.
Although, a CTO countered later on by saying that’s what business analysts (BA’s) are for - to provide the spec. I guess their job is to be experts in a lot of things then…
Bruce told us about how he got into software as an arts major by automating the logs at the student radio station. He went onto to work with mainframes with huge (~60cm) disks that could contain a whopping 1MB! Then later worked at Pixar where he used a text-based dialect of APL for animation! These days he is pioneering new approaches to Open Source that would enable contributors to get paid as they push code.
I had a fanboi moment when I briefly met Liz Rice - who I congratulated for her awesome and inspirational live demo skills. For someone who regularly performs in front of an audience, I can say compiling and running code live takes some guts!
Overall, had a great time. I am now the proud owner of an OCP keyfob and a bowler hat! The hat was not stolen, I hasten to add. Laptop is now resplendent with its new stickers gathered from FreeBSD and Github, the hand decorated biscuits were delicious too.
It was a lot less stuffy than I feared and had some interesting chats. One CEO told me they receive 100 CVs per week for Go developer jobs - perhaps hold back on getting into the industry myself then… :)