Herding Code 243: Shawn Wildermuth on his new film, Hello World

11/25/20 • -1 min

Kevin and Jon talk to Shawn Wildermuth about his new documentary film, Hello World. Shawn talks about how this film project began as a “love letter to software development,” exploring how amazing this career can be. As he delved into it he became more aware of the lack representation of women and people of color in this profession, and this film details his exploration of that topic through interviews and historical background.

You can pre-order the film now, and watch it on-demand on a lot of streaming platforms starting December 15,2020.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 243: Shawn Wildermuth on his new film, Hello World

https://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-243-Shawn-Wildermuth-on-the-Hello-World-Film.mp3

Links:

Transcript:

Jon: [00:00:09] Hello, and welcome to Herding Code. This episode is being recorded November 20, 2020. And today we’re talking to Shawn Wildermuth about the Hello World film. Shawn, can you introduce yourself and the film?

Shawn: [00:00:22] I’d be more than happy to. I’m Shawn Wildermuth. I’m a technologist and mostly a teacher these days. They don’t let me around code anymore. But I’ve got a blog at wildermuth.com and I made a documentary about software developers called Hello World.

Jon: [00:00:38] So what’s kind of the main focus. Like how do you approach software developers and you know, what, what are you kind of talking about there?

Shawn: [00:00:48] Sure. I started making the film. I’ll tell it in this kind of story. I started making the film because I wanted to sort of do a love letter to software development because it’s been so incredibly useful to me. Like it has saved me from a life of working in a 7-11 night shift. And I just love everything about.

How interesting the job is, and I want to sort of encourage people who didn’t think they could do it, that they could. And so that was sort of the first approach. And in the middle of that the me too movement came through and some other things in our industry were changing with conferences and such, and I realized that.

I hadn’t really worked with almost any women and certainly not women from the United States or Canada that I’ve worked on exclusively with people that looked like me. You know, I look a lot like a, the comic book guy, if you don’t know what I look like from the Simpsons. Right. I fit the, the stereotype really well.

And so I pivoted the movie to be about the lack of women and people of color, especially in the industry. Because it’s it’s, as I say, in the film, it wasn’t that there weren’t enough women or people of color in, in, in In software development. It was that I had never noticed there weren’t enough.

Like, it just didn’t even occur to me to notice. And I like to think of myself as someone who’s, you know, at least should notice those sorts of things. And so in that same time, I was having a dinner with Richard Campbell years and years ago. And he was mentioning about the early women in software development, being the first programmers, which was a story I didn’t know.

And, and that’s part of what we talk about is sort of the history. Of software development and how this sort of went from one thing to another. And then I looked back and it had been five years and I didn’t know what I was doing with my life.

Jon: [00:02:43] it’s a, it’s really fascinating that you’ve kind of created a documentary during a time of some transition. And some of my favorite documentaries that I’ve seen have kind of. Almost, but either through discovery during the filming, or just kind of by happy accident with evolution, you know, with history of evolving have kind of captured things.

I remember there was a documentary I saw called startup.com and it happened during the.com startup time and that startup bust and it followed these founders and, you know, getting huge valuation and going and interviewing. You know, in the white house and then everything. And then they get into huge fights and then the whole thing comes crashing down and the, and the film captured all that.

And it sounds to me like, I mean, and just observing everything that’s gone on, it’s b...

You can pre-order the film now, and watch it on-demand on a lot of streaming platforms starting December 15,2020.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 243: Shawn Wildermuth on his new film, Hello World

https://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-243-Shawn-Wildermuth-on-the-Hello-World-Film.mp3

Links:

Transcript:

Jon: [00:00:38] So what’s kind of the main focus. Like how do you approach software developers and you know, what, what are you kind of talking about there?

And it sounds to me like, I mean, and just observing everything that’s gone on, it’s b...

Previous Episode

Herding Code 242: The COVID Cabin Fever

Does time still exist? Maybe! Kevin, Rob, and Jon chat about some of the top concerns of our current time:

Sourdough bread
WordPress and PHP
No Code development
Knock knock jokes

Download / Listen: Herding Code 242: The COVID Cabin Fever

https://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-242-Sourdough-and-PHP-and-No-Code-Dev-and-Knock-Knock-Jokes.mp3

Links:

https://github.com/nushell/nushell
https://jeffsternberg.com/2020/03/11/beyond-spreadsheets/

Transcript:

Jon: [00:00:07] And hello, welcome to Herding Code. It is July 31, 2020 on the one hand. Holy cow. The year is like getting closer to done on the other hand. Will this year ever end?

Rob: [00:00:20] Yeah, can the year just be over? Can we just be done?

Jon: [00:00:25] Wow. Yes, it is.

Rob: [00:00:29] I think I mentioned before the podcast that wasn’t going to be salty. I think I lied.

Jon: [00:00:33] Yeah.

Kevin: [00:00:34] This is the bad place. The year will never end.

Jon: [00:00:37] You know, on the one hand. So it was looking at it with since April, we talked last and we did the, Freaky Friday episode where we talked about the trading trading placces, Mac and Windows and all that. And then I was like, man, on the one hand has much changed. I mean, cause cause it’s like nerds in captivity.

What do we do?

Kevin: [00:00:57] It’s not actually that different from nerds, not in captivity, sadly.

Jon: [00:01:00] That’s true. That’s true. All right. Has anyone else, w we just, we have to cross this off the list who here has made a loaf of sourdough bread. Okay. I’ve made enough for everybody. I’ve made all the sourdough bread.

Rob: [00:01:12] We just...

Kevin: [00:01:13] ship it out, man. Send us some!

Rob: [00:01:15] Yeah, I know. Wait, where’s my, where’s my bread, man.

Jon: [00:01:18] Okay. So it was like after a while, I have three daughters and they’re getting bored too. And so the middle one kind of gets into baking. So I was like, all right, let’s try it out. You know? And then it’s totally the nerd rabbit hole. Once you start it, then you’re like, Oh, I really need a Dutch oven now. And now, now I need this, but it’s pretty fun.

I halfway through, I really there’s this website Breadtopia, and there’s this no knead bread recipe. And it’s actually like, most of the work like you do, maybe about a half hour of work, but it’s spread over two days. So you could like go mix ingredients, you walk away for hours and then you come back and you’d like, flip it around and then you come back and then you put it in the oven and you walk away.

So it’s a lot of walkaway comeback stuff. But the one thing I realized after a while is that. It was not very sour. And then I started reading and there was all these hacks you could do, but then people are like, you know, sourdough, you buy from the store has some sort of acid in it, citric acid or lactic acid, some sort of acid.

So I just started putting white wine vinegar in, and then I had to like, it messed with the chemistry and I had to change around the ingredients and stuff, but that totally worked. Then everyone’s like, this is the best ever. So don’t tell my family, I’m putting. White wine vinegar in the sourdough and we’re all good.

Rob: [00:02:35] Yeah. You know, it reminds me of making, cause you know bread and beer are very similar and yeah. And so I used to be a huge, I haven’t brewed beer in a very long time, but I remember going to the store and they’re like, well, you know, if you, if you can’t get that bitterness, you’re looking for here’s some extract, you know, or if you can’t get the aroma here, just drop a few drops of this.

It’s you know, I like, wait, that’s, that’s cheating.

Jon: [00:03:00] It’s totally cheating. And yet,

Rob: [00:03:04] Yeah. And yet, right. If the beer tastes good and people drink it and they like it. So who cares? I don’t

Jon: [00:03:09] that reminds me in a Malcolm Gladwell book. I forget what it was, but it was. One of these things where they’re like, they did these taste tests and they had some kind of beer taste test and they put in, basalmic vinegar into some of them. And people like picked the basalmic vinegar is like much better beer and it like just had a few vinegar i...

Next Episode

Herding Code 244: Ben Scheirman on SwiftUI and Combine

Kevin, Jon and Rob talk to Ben Scheirman about developing user interfaces for the Apple platform with SwiftUI and Combine.

Ben screencasts at NSScreencast and is the creator of the Combine Swift course.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 244: Herding Code 244: Ben Scheirman on SwiftUI and Combine

https://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-244-Ben-Scheirman-on-SwiftUI-and-Combine.mp3

Links:

Ben is @subdigital on Twitter
Combine Swift – a Combine course for mere mortals
NSScreencast – Top-notch tutorials for Swift developers
SwiftUI overview in Apple developer docs
Combine overview in Apple developer docs

Transcript:

Herding Code – March 5, 2021 – Ben Schierman on SwiftUI and Combine

Kevin: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome to another episode of Herding Code , our quarterly episode here. This is being recorded on March 367 2021. And today we were talking to Ben Schierman. Ben runs NSScreencast, which is a video training site for all things iOS and Apple development, and Ben’s going to talk to us today about SwiftUI, a relatively new UI framework from Apple for writing Apple platform applications. So thanks for joining us, Ben.

Ben: [00:00:40] Well, thanks for inviting me. It’s good to be here.

Kevin: [00:00:42] So why don’t we start with the sort of high level, you know, what is SwiftUI? What makes it different? Like what, how is it different than what came before it.

Ben: [00:00:50] So there’s a lot of history and the Apple development community. We’ve had AppKit for 30 years now which follows a kind of model view controller based approach. And then when the iPhone came out, they, they sorta took lessons learned from that. And. And created UI kit. And so when you look at creating apps for the Mac or apps for the iPhone, if you squint, they’re extremely similar.

But app kit has that, you know, 20, 30 years of legacy cruft that they just can never throw away. And so you know, things are a little bit different. Like, you know, you have UI color versus NS color UI being the UI kit version for the iOS. And, and then you have things like the coordinate system on the Mac is.

The origins in the lower left corner, which hearkens back to the, I guess the, the way they used to send commands to the printer or something, I don’t really know, but on iOS, the, the origin is, is you know, top left. And so there’s, you know, minor differences here and there, but ultimately you’ve got views that know how to draw themselves they’re object oriented.

So you can have a subclass of a view that is a button or a label. And you know, the API is, are, are pretty strong, but There’s there’s always, you know, as our applications get more complex sometimes people complain about the patterns not being enough. And people joke about MVC standing for massive view controller instead of model view controller.

Because, you know, when you give somebody a pattern and say, this is where you put your logic, they tend to put all the code there. And anyway, so last year wait, Time is meaningless nowadays. This is, you know, at least five years ago in, in COVID time Apple released a SwiftUI, which is kind of a radical new UI framework for, for writing in air quotes, cross-platform applications.

As long as your platform comes from Apple it will work on T V U S and the Mac and the watch and the iPhone and the iPad. And SwiftUI takes just a totally different approach to, to writing user interfaces. So instead of model view controller, instead of your views being object oriented you know, and the model view controller world you would typically have of you that you would create say, I’m going to create like a new UI label and I’m gonna attach it as a sub view of my main view.

And then I might read a model. In order to tell what the text property of my label’s going to be. So like on a viewed load, I could say, okay you know, a model dot first name, I’m going to assign that to my labels, text property. But there’s nothing in that relationship. That’s going to continually keep that up to date.

So I have to respond to events and note or re sort of update my model again. Well, SwiftUI is totally different whe...