Darrel Miller – part 2

In part 2 of this insightful interview, Darrel Miller talks about starting out in software development and gives his unique insight into the choices available for new software developers. You can listen to part 1 here.

Darrel’s Bio:

Darrel is an API Evangelist for Microsoft. He has been building distributed business applications on the Microsoft platform for more than 20 years. He is an active member of the .NET community and OSS contributor.

Please say hi to Darrel on Twitter.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Darrel: I have been in the industry for just over 20 years now. A large part of my career was spent building line of business applications – payroll, time and attendance, inventory management. In fact, I had my own company myself… for many any years…

Darrel: I started writing open source stuff and got involved in that community and that got me involved informally in a developer-advocate role and when John Sheehan asked to get involved in that capacity at Runscope, I jumped at that opportunity…

Darrel: Just recently, I started as an API evangelist at Microsoft.

Arsalan: We have to focus. We can’t just be a programmer anymore… It’s very difficult to figure what to do because we have evolved to a point where things are complicated…

Darrel: If you also look at Computer Science from a different perspective, some things haven’t changed in a very long time and I think that’s how you can survive in the industry. You have get back down to some of the fundamentals – the basics – and look at the stuff that really hasn’t changed in a long time. One of the reasons I really started investing my time in learning about HTTP was back in 2006-2007 and I was like, well, here’s a protocol that hasn’t changed at all in the last 8 years…

Darrel: If I were looking into learning a systems programming language, I probably wouldn’t look at C. I will probably look at Rust. If I am looking for something dynamic, you can go the Ruby route – you can go the Python route. Pick one. I wouldn’t necessarily say you have to learn both.

Darrel: I tend to have the ability to look at two completely different concepts and find a way of merging them together in ways that other people tend not to see very often… and that has been handy at times. It’s also taken me down some rather strange paths at times…

Darrel: For me, it has always been about the people and for that reason Twitter has been the most valuable…

Darrel: If you follow a certain set of rules when you’re building your software… it doesn’t really matter what language you are using. As long as you use the right patterns and the right approaches, the software will be maintainable…

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