Episode 20 – Glenn Block is a fan of the mentoring culture

Glenn’s Bio:
By day Glenn Block works at Splunk making it easier for developers to work with Big Data as he drives the development of Splunk’s Dev platform. By night, Glenn is an active maintainer and contributor of several OSS projects including scripts (https://github.com/scriptcs/scri…). He is a polyglot with his most recent favorite language being node.js, and he is very passionate about Web API development. Glenn is a frequent speaker internationally on various topics that affect developers and a published author. You can find him tweeting as @gblock into the wee hours of the night.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Today we have Glenn block with us. How are you, Glenn?
Glenn: I’m good. How are you, Arsalan?
Arsalan: I’m doing fantastic and it’s so good to have you because you are somebody that a whole lot of people look up to. You have a ton of experience. You work at Microsoft in a very important position and were going to talk about that. But, first, I want to learn about you, Glenn. How do you describe yourself?
Glenn: I am a person who loves to learning new things. That’s a big part of who I am. I also really like helping people. I’ve been fortunate enough to be in places where I’ve been able to help people either from a work perspective by helping guide others or within the community by putting together events or just connecting with other developers. I love connecting with other people. I really enjoy networking and just meeting people. Fortunately, I’ve been able to work in places where my work has brought me to different parts of the world as well. So, I haven’t just been limited to my local area. I love exploring the world and going to different places, meeting new people, and learning new things.
Glenn: I’m also a parent. I’m married and I have a daughter who is now 11 years old. That’s also been a pretty amazing thing to just watch my daughter grow up and helping to guide her along the path as well. She’s not at all interested into being a technologist. So, I’m not guiding her along that path. I love reading. I’m big into reading and I love cafés. If you come to Seattle, you might find me hanging out and drinking my latte in a café. I’m a big latte and espresso person.
Arsalan: How do you like Seattle?
Glenn: There are parts of it that I like. The rain can really get to you. Although lately what looks like global warming we haven’t been getting really much of it. Seattle is a cool city. It’s beautiful if you’re into the outdoors. There are lots of great places to go that are really not far away. It’s a big rock climbing, snowboarding, skiing, the outdoors community here.
Arsalan: So, you have a lot of experience. You’re currently working at Microsoft. What are you doing there?
Glenn: I don’t work at Microsoft anymore. I work at Splunk, but I drive our developer platform. Splunk is a data analytics product. It has quite a few of ways that you can integrate with the as a developer. One that’s become increasingly interesting over the last year has been systems that want to push their data directly to Splunk. So I spent a lot of energy in the last year, helping us to build out capabilities in Splunk that offer a really easy way to push from third-party systems, or even from IOT from devices, into Splunk. But, overall, my focus is on developer interactions with the product.
Arsalan: So, you’re working with APIs and you’re focused on rest services for the last few years. Is that a true statement?
Glenn: Well, not so much in my work. In my work environment, a lot of the API work that I’ve done at has actually been our SDKs that developers will use to talk to our APIs. So I drive about eight different SDKs for different languages that make it easy for developers who want to integrate with our rest API and to do it in an idiomatic way,

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