Developer on Fire
Developer on Fire
Episode 031 | Scott Wlaschin - Learn from Diverse Sources
Guest:
Scott Wlaschin talks with Dave Rael about the value of sharing your knowledge, the need for broad expertise, and that all problems are about people and never technical in nature.
Scott Wlaschin is a .NET developer, architect and author. He has over 20 years experience in a wide variety of areas from high-level UX/UI to low-level database implementations. He loves learning programming languages, his favorites being Smalltalk, but also Prolog, Python, and more recently, F#, which he blogs about at fsharpforfunandprofit.com.
Chapters:
- - Dave introduces the show and Scott Wlaschin
- - Scott encourages everyone to blog and shares the benefits of explaining and teaching
- - Scott's definition of value
- - The things that "light Scott up"
- - Learning as an end in and of itself
- - How Scott got started writing software
- - Software and LEGOs
- - Scott and the functional approach
- - Scott's story of failure, the importance of listening to customers
- - Quotable quote: "We thought the problem was a technical problem and it's never a technical problem. It's always a people problem."
- - Quotable quote: "No matter what the problem is, it's always a people problem." - Gerald Weinberg
- - The problem with Google
- - Scott's greatest success story, getting customer feedback and making Agile work, delivering ahead of schedule
- - Testing with F# and making illegal states unrepresentable
- - How Scott stays current with what he needs to know
- - Scott's book recommendation
- - The things that have Scott most excited about his present and future
- - The greatest sources of pain in Scott's life and work
- - The things about which Scott like to geek out apart from software
- - Scott's prediction for the future of software
- - Scott's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Farewell
Resources:
- Scott's Blog Site: F# for fun and profit
- Gerald Weinberg
- Ward Cunningham's collection of Gerald Weinberg quotes
- Jeff Atwood on the Gerald Weinberg quote
- The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist - Frederick Brooks
Scott's book recommendation:
- The Design of Everyday Things - Donald Norman
- Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is - Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg
Scott's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
1. Listen to your customers
2. Learn from your mistakes and learn from them as fast as possible
3. Broaden your knowledge and experience - diversity is good in teams, it's good inside your brain, too
