Command Line Heroes - Introducing Season 5 of Command Line Heroes

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

After four seasons of epic tales about how command line heroes have shaped the tech landscape, we're tackling a new topic: the job itself.  Season 5 covers the job of being a coder. How coding careers begin. How the job is done. How it’s changed. And how coders are shaping its evolution.Clive Thompson, tech journalist and friend of the podcast, joins us for this 3-episode mini-season. Clive shares his insights from the over 200 interviews he’s conducted with coders: programmers, developers, software engineers, sysadmins, and more. The first episode drops July 14, 2020. Subscribe today and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest updates. Head over to redhat.com/commandlineheroes to catch up on seasons 1-4.

I'm the least likely person you'll ever meet to be in tech. For the last four seasons of Command Line Heroes, we featured so many epic stories of coders shaping the landscape around us. What we haven't talked so much about is the job of coding. How it's done, where it's done, how it's changed over time, and how we go about getting a job as a coder. The truth is, only 8% of all coding jobs are in Silicon Valley. Everywhere else, there's coding jobs are everywhere.

Coming up in our all-new season, Season 5, we're devoting three full episodes to becoming a coder. All about the careers of us developers, sysadmins, architects, engineers, and programmers. I said to him, I want to write the operating system. I was probably the only person who could write the operating system at that point. Wesley just said, well, no problem. You can have it at home. I'll bet you don't have a computer in your living room. It was quite a novelty, to say the least. And they would just give me these trite defenses for why remote couldn't work. Oh, you can't do collaboration. The magic only happens

around the whiteboard. And I thought like, what? People still think like this? How is that possible? I think the true standout stars are the ones that really look deep within themselves and go, okay, I can understand the coding part of this. What do I need to then go understand about human nature, how to motivate a team, how to not let the worst parts of myself affect the projects that I'm working on. I believe that's the bravest choice that you can have in software development. He got it working and it turned into not just a company, it turned into an entirely new activity. He created that idea.

He's a terrible coder, like by his own admission. But if you have a really great idea, and you're a proud 1Xer, you can tilt the axi of the universe just as much, and maybe even more, than the quote-unquote 10Xers. Joining me for all three episodes this season is science and technology journalist and author Clive Thompson. He interviewed hundreds of developers, sysadmins, architects, and programmers at all stages of their careers for his book, Coders. And while I was doing it, I spoke to, boy, an awful lot of software developers all over the ecosystem.

Command Line Heroes is an original podcast from Red Hat. Join us for our all-new season. I'm your host, Saranya Tvarek. Keep on coding.