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!

Links:

• Ruby
• Thought Bot
• Visual Basic
• Pascal
• Java
• Rails
• @DerekPrior
• Derek’s GitHub

Picks:

Charles

• Ruby Dev Summit
• Ruby Hack

Derek

• Base.cs podcast
• Lucky Framework
• The Weekend Woodworker