Jyotsna Raghuraman talks about her unconventional entry into software, and overcoming her fears.

Note that this was recording at the Indy.Code() conference in a hallway, so the audio may be a bit noisier than usual. At one point there was a loud buzzer from a freight elevator.

Show Notes:

• Check out Jyotsna's blog posts on SEP
• You can contact her at the email address given out in the show's audio

Jyotsna Raghuraman is on Twitter.

Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.

Theme music is "Crosscutting Concerns" by The Dirty Truckers, check out their music on Amazon or iTunes.

Jesse Riley is thinking about giving it all up and becoming a farmer.

Show Notes:

• Jesse Riley's blog post on The Farmer Effect
• Book: Zero to One
• Book: Brain Rules
• Book: Daring Greatly
• I don't think this made it into the recording, but we also discussed Oblique Strategies cards
• Mike Rowe's podcast: The Way I Heard It
• Video: the end of Office Space (movie) where Peter eschews computer programming for road work (this video is likely to get taken down, but here's a link, language may be NSFW)
• Video: Leap Motion
• Video: the famous "it's a unix system" clip from Jurassic Park

Jesse Riley is on Twitter

Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.

Theme music is "Crosscutting Concerns" by The Dirty Truckers, check out their music on Amazon or iTunes.

Short version: My new job title is Developer Advocate, and I am working for Couchbase.

Long version: Being a developer advocate / developer evangelist is something that I've been considering for a long time. I've enjoyed speaking, blogging, writing, screencasting, teaching, helping, networking for a while now. But until now, I had always done these things only in my spare time. The thought of making those activities into my full time job appealed to me. But, there are a lot of developer advocate positions out there, and most of them don't appeal to me, because the product or the company doesn't appeal to me. The few times I managed to get interviews with really awesome companies with great products, it didn't work out, and I thought that maybe it wasn't meant to be.

But I'm very excited to announce that I finally found a DA opening with a great company with a cool product (a NoSQL database company based in Silicon Valley!).

I've done a lot of thinking this year about my career, and what direction I want to go. I've been a coder for my entire career. Some of the best parts of being a coder is sharing knowledge with other coders: teaching, writing, and expanding my own knowledge in the process. As much as I enjoyed working for my previous employer, they make a product that isn't developer-facing, and therefore a developer advocate position just wasn't going to happen for me there.

I'm ready to begin a new chapter, and I'm looking forward to reaching out to developers and helping to build the Couchbase community.

After working at Heuristic Solutions for 2 years, I've decided to take my career in a new direction.

I started at Heuristic Solutions with big plans and big expectations (both from myself and from others). Things did not pan out as well as I hoped, due to a combination of factors, both professional and personal. But, I made the transition from consultant to the LearningBuilder product team, and that's where I've spent most of my time while employed there. It's been an immense and enriching challenge working on a very complex piece of software; perhaps the most complex (in a good way) piece of software I've ever had the honor to work on. Sure, it's not perfect, no code base is, but it has consistently provided a canvas to apply and grow my skills as a developer.

Everyone I've worked with, and especially the Central Ohio-based members of the product team, I highly recommend to anyone seeking out a team that works hard, thinks hard, and cares about what they're building and how they're building it.

So, you might be asking, if it's so great, why are you leaving? Well, I think that will be clear in the next blog post. In the meantime, it just remains for me to thank:

• Seth - for being a great technical leader, and for originally recruiting me to join Heuristics
• Calvin - for pairing with me over the last 2 years, and coding circles around me while doing it (bada bing bada boom)
• Brian - for helping to beat me into shape as a QA lead and playing those bongos congas so well (I hope you get that island in the sun)
• Michael - for hanging out with me and becoming an excellent coder, and automater of everything
• Scott - for always answering the call, pushing the technology limits, and just being there in the consulting trenches at the beginning
• Sara - for being a passionate UX and UI whiz, and for talking Star Wars (I've stlil not met her in person but would like to!)
• Glen - for allowing me to open up on a personal level, and providing much-needed guidance
• Christopher and Ali - for being generous, kind, and fair
• Steve, Tom, Robert, and the rest - for helping me whenever I needed it, and for your hard work accomodating customers and building relationships

A special thanks goes out to:

• Gate 35X
• No Winning
• Kuli Loach
• A closet-sized office

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for what's next.

Welcome to another "Weekly Concerns". This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.

• Why Your Previous Developer was Terrible - I tend to lash out emotionally when I see bad code, but I always feel uncomfortable blaming the previous developer, since I have no idea what kind of constraints (personally and professionally) they were working under. It's not always possible, but I try my best to seperate the art from the artist (and the code from the coder).
• Learn CSS Layout is an interesting CSS tutorial, that kinda reminds me of the various koans and git immersion types of tutorial sites.
• Did you see that "Everything from a 1991 Radio Shack ad is now done on your phone" thing making the rounds recently? Here's another analysis of technology costs then and now. Very roughly, the equivalent technology is not the $3000 nominal price in the Radio Shack ad, but at least $3.56 million.
• In MySQL, there's a sometimes handy GROUP_CONCAT function built in. Pete Shearer shows a way to accomplish something similar using FOR XML PATH and Microsoft SQL.

If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.