The CS Primer Show

Charlie wants to know if he can learn how to "think like an engineer", just like the Matt Damon/Mark Watney character in THE MARTIAN -- and Oz has some good suggestions, as per usual.

Shownotes:

• Von Neumann probes
• We Are Legion (We Are Bob) - Dennis E. Taylor
• Nibbles - Charlie's short story about von Neumann probes
• The Martian - Andy Weir:
• Shimmer - Charlie's short story about mining a giant diamond asteroid
• Ian Hubert's YouTube channel
• This week's XKCD reference
• Primer (movie)
• Farcaster social media protocol
• Charlie's "fling" experiment on Farcaster

Omar Rayward attended one of the first ever coding bootcamp cohorts, now he's a Senior Staff Software Engineer. Oz and Charlie connect with Omar about his study habits, motivation, and whatever else it takes to keep up his consistent learning habits.

Shownotes:

• How to be consistent (Oz's recent article, featuring Omar!)

Charlie's unexpected packet loss devolves into a live Oz networking lesson.

Matt's (my) traceroute
* How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer Knocked Large Parts of the Internet Offline Today
* Border Gateway Protocol
* Christmas Day Bug on ARPANET (grep for Christmas in 1973 section)
* Great horned owl

Oz and Charlie catch up with Felix Tripier - now a Senior Staff Software Engineer at quantum computing company IonQ - for the first time in three years! Felix was our first guest on Escaping Web - a double high school and college dropout who become a self-taught web developer and is now a quantum computing engineer - so it only made sense for him to be our first guest on The CS Primer Show.

We discuss Felix's path to staff engineer, the engineering manager vs. staff engineer career choices, staff engineering archetypes, building software for and working with scientists, the movie Grave of the Fireflies, the book When We Cease To Understand The World, and, of course, reference an apt XKCD comic.

Ammar Mian is a software engineer and the co-founder of startup health tech company Malla - and another former student of Oz's and Bradfield School of Computer Science! Many software engineers daydream about starting their own company one day, so we've got Ammar on the show this week to give us the goods. Is it still fun? Can you still get into flow? Are you still coding? Does Oz want to die on Mars? All this and more!

Shownotes:

• Malla
• The Wiggles
• The Six Levels of Interaction with a System
• Zone of proximal development
• Red-bellied black snake
• Reentry [book] - more recent history of SpaceX
• Red Mars [book] - Kim Stanley Robinson