Podcast 392: Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming languages?
We chat with Rennie Clayton, Senior Director of Platform Engineering here at Stack Overflow, who grew up in numerous countries and learned programming by following along with his mother’s college coursework.
Episode Notes
Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas.
Audio tape drives are real! Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked.
If you want to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand.
Rennie worked at Blackberry, and Ben remembered his colleagues at The Verge fondly hoping for their comeback. In fact, here’s Ben hoping for their comeback!
We did a podcast on moving from engineer to manager, which Rennie said was one of the hardest things to do.
Rennie gave a shoutout to the book he’s reading now, The Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson.
Rennie works on our Platform team, which works on all of our reusable stuff, including our design system, Stacks.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to Vinzzz for explaining how to: Create an array of random numbers in Swift.
Tags: platform, software engineering, the stack overflow podcast
3 Comments
In 1950, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, proposed, in an article titled, “A Proposal for a Total Peace Offensive,” that the United States establish a voluntary agency for young Americans to be sent around the world to fulfill humanitarian and development objectives.[9] Subsequently, throughout the 1950s, Reuther gave speeches to the following effect:
I have been saying for a long time that I believe the more young Americans who are trained to join with other young people in the world to be sent abroad with slide rule, textbook, and medical kit to help people help themselves with the tools of peace, the fewer young people will need to be sent with guns and weapons of war.[10][11]
Programming is only partly derived from language and syntax; it is partially dependent upon highly structured thinking. Without both elements, any programmer is going to experience difficulties.
This show claimed to use Descript in a recent podcast. So please learn how to use the Sound Studio feature to remove the high frequency “s’s” and the echo. Also, noise cancelling mics are only $20 these days. Just because you are good at interviewing doesn’t mean you should be able to publish a podcast. I couldn’t make it past the first 60 seconds of Rennie’s interview. A very poor quality audio podcast.