On this week’s episode we sit down with Corey Grusden to talk about online vs offline communities, learning processes and a bunch of old computer games from the 80's.

Corey works for So Fetch, but he started programming when computers tied up phone lines and he was 8 years old. His introduction to tech started with a golfing game on his family's 80286 computer. He was installing sound cards, memory and drives before he was in middle school.

Corey found his first tech-community locally - with a bunch of friends and neighbors. They'd pretend to be gaming, when really they were programming to enable their characters to play without them. Corey was basically automating and contributing to opensource before he realized what that meant. Because of that he's proficient in coding that was barely around by the time I got a computer - Q Basic, Perl, TinTin and the BBS. We chat about these, and the importance of having social-interactions offline, especi ally when you're in the tech-industry.

It wasn't all fun-times for Corey, and he was super open to talking about the downward spirals that some of his friends in the tech-community went through and how he lived off of basically nothing for awhile - without realizing it at the time.

Corey landed his first job by lying. He had no work-experience, but was the only candidate to answer all 4 of the interview questions on programming correctly. So he was hired! It sounds like a movie script, but it was his reality. He explains the path to getting there, and the benefits he had from being able to apply what he was learning immediately. There wasn’t a class, professor or studying. Of course this comes with pros and cons, and so we talk about them, and the difference in his learning process compared to more traditional ones.

Corey still believes that Legend of the Red Dragon is super fun and that the telephone is the lost art of communication.

• Corey Grusden
• Corey on GitHub
• So Fetch
• Q Basic
• Perl
• TinTin
• The BBS
• Major Mud
• Halt & Catch Fire
• Legend of the Red Dragon