text stringlengths 0 1.82k |
|---|
• Comparison of programming languages, with Go being viewed as a "programmer's language" that allows for deep understanding and customization |
• Todd McLeod's approach to building software as a craft, emphasizing thorough knowledge of tools and materials. |
• Go programming language is praised for its innovation and ability to bring programming to the next level. |
• The language is described as "suffering no fools," requiring a deep understanding of programming concepts to use effectively. |
• Teaching Go to beginners can be challenging, particularly with individuals who are hesitant to ask questions. |
• Encouraging students to ask questions and creating an atmosphere where they feel comfortable not knowing the answer is crucial for learning. |
• Research suggests that there may be psychological break points at ages 13 and 25, after which it becomes harder to learn a new language. |
• Discussion about whether kids should learn to program early on |
• Todd McLeod's opinion on kids learning programming at a young age |
• The importance of formal training in logic before learning programming |
• Visual aspects of programming and how to convey them to beginners |
• Todd McLeod's approach to teaching online courses, including using visual aids like whiteboards and sketching diagrams |
• Why people rave about Todd McLeod's Udemy course on Go |
• Discussion of the value of experience and expertise in teaching programming |
• Importance of approachability in teaching and creating learning content |
• Generosity and willingness to help others with knowledge and skills |
• Go 1.8 Beta 1 release and its features, including profiling and plugin support |
• Concerns about dynamically loaded plugins and potential security risks |
• Context and cancellation in programming, and the need for effective teaching of these concepts |
• Upcoming webinars and conferences |
• Kafka implementation in Go (jocko) |
• Brian Ketelsen's enthusiasm for Kafka and its uses |
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and its benefits |
• Shoutouts to open-source maintainers: WSL team and Go Meetup organizers |
• Todd McLeod discusses his gratitude for free software and its impact on the world |
• He mentions specific examples of free software he uses daily, including GoDoc.org and RFCs |
• The conversation turns to the creator of GoDoc.org, Gary Byrd, who donated it to the Go Team |
• The hosts express appreciation for their listeners, sponsors (Minio and Backtrace), and encourage sharing and subscribing to the show |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Okay, we're back. Today we have guest Todd McLeod joining us, and we'll be talking about a lot of exciting events in the Go community. Why don't we start off with you introducing yourself, Todd? Tell us who you are and what you've been doing in the Go community? |
**Todd McLeod:** Yeah, great. I'm really glad to be here, I'm super excited to share my experience with Go and some of the things I've learned about Go. I'm a tenured faculty at Fresno City College in CIT and I'm also adjunct faculty at California State University Fresno in Computer Science, which is a bit of surprise.... |
I really love to code, I like the creative process behind it. I feel like I have an artist's soul, and being able to create things, bringing together the left mind and the right mind, the engineering, the science... The precision of programming, but also being able to build something - I love that. |
In 2013 my job duties had shifted at the university and the college in 2005, and I was put in charge of online education, and I basically started this institute to teach all of the college university professors in Central California how to teach online, because I'd been teaching online since 1997; I really embraced the... |
That kind of wound down in 2013 and they were like, "Well, do you wanna jump back into coding?" I was like "Yeah, okay... So what server-side language should I use now?" and "Do people still use Dreamweaver?" \[laughter\] and my colleague just shook her head... She was like, "Oh, god... You've got a lot to learn!" |
I started looking around at different server-side languages, like "Hey, what JSP, ASP...? Dang, we can't use ColdFusion? I knew that one! PHP... Right? Or do we wanna go with Ruby, or Node, or Python...?" and then I had a student who I'd trained back in the early 2000s who'd become an awesome JavaScript engineer - Aaro... |
\[04:09\] So they hired these guys who helped create C, helped create UNIX, helped create UTF-8 and they created this new language, Go. "You gotta check that out. It's built to do what Google does." |
So when I heard that, I was like, "Okay, you totally got my interest." The credentials sold me alone, so I just started really having to level my skill set up. It was just like late nights, late nights, late nights, 2013... Is this too much? Do you guys want me to keep rambling? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** No, ramble on! |
**Todd McLeod:** This is my intro, right? 2013, late nights, Pluralsight, Lynda.com, Udacity... I went through this crazy course on Udacity - Introduction to Computer Science. It's one of the hardest courses I've ever taken in my life. It started out, the first couple of videos were on YouTube, and there was like 65,00... |
So it was a crazy intense course, taught myself Python online, taught myself Java, and then started picking up Go. Got some grant money, put some programs together... |
In 2014 December, that's when I started learning Go, and then in 2015, literally two-and-a-half weeks later I was teaching it at the university the first time through. It was kind of a laboratory project where all of the students and myself are trying to figure out "How do we do web dev with this language?" Then in 201... |
Caleb really broke some incredible trail, and then we took all that which we learned from Caleb and we've just been teaching it at California State University Fresno and Fresno City College, and it's been an incredible experience just to be involved. I love the language. I love the fact -- to me it's a programmer's lan... |
\[07:56\] Once you understand all that, using the net package, you can start to put together your own server and do all of your own routing without even having to rely upon what's available to you in the net/http package. But when you can do that, you understand the net/http package. |
I think Go is amazing. For web dev it's my first choice. I love it because of the performance. Another interesting anecdote - just to finish the ramble - is when I first started learning Go there weren't a lot of materials out there for web dev, but Go was really big quickly in China, because Go scales incredibly; Go d... |
It's been a fun experience, at times exhausting... Last night I was up 'till -- I mean, I saw Bill Kennedy tweet at like 3:30 my time, so he was just getting up, 6:30 East Coast time, and I was like, "Alright, Bill, talk to you in a couple hours..." I don't know, I've got a bit of that obsessive, intense, passionate fo... |
I'm putting together this training now to do web dev with Go, taking everything that Caleb taught all of us, and everything we've learned through teaching it. I think we've done seven sections now at the university and college, so everything we've learned teaching at the university and college to graduate students in c... |
Refining what we learned from Caleb and having taught it in these different environments, we've put together this really good, approachable - and that's the key word, approachable - code pathway for learning web dev with Go. Because I think for a language to be successful - and I really want Go to be successful because... |
I think one of the next big things that I'd love to see for the language is like a Tony Gaddis style book; Tony Gaddis is a famous programming textbook author in academia, who's done some really popular books on Java, C and stuff like that. So I'd love to see a Tony Gaddis style book, because I think another one of the... |
It's really hard when you're already in the industry and you've got your day job, to then work all day, and if you're passionate you wanna just keep working around the clock at whatever you're doing... It's really hard to like, "Hey, I know Ruby, and I could get this knocked out in six weeks on Ruby, or I could take a ... |
I think the language could really use a big foothold in academia, and I'm happy to be able to help with that. I'm happy to help bring it along and enjoy it. I also like the venture of cutting trails... So that's a little bit of my story, or a lot of my story. \[laughs\] Nice having all of you guys here, thanks for list... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Good job, Todd. With that said, bye everybody. \[laughs\] |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, but why don't we take a moment to introduce the rest of our show? \[laughs\] This is Brian Ketelsen, I'm sitting in for Erik St. Martin today, who's in an airport listening live... Hi, Erik, we miss you! And we've got Bill Kennedy in today... |
**Bill Kennedy:** \[12:04\] Hey, everybody! |
**Brian Ketelsen:** And Carlisia Pinto is joining us, as usual... And we're all excited to be here. |
**Todd McLeod:** You know, funny story - and I love having Bill on the conversation with us, because I was like, "I've gotta learn Go! I've been charged by my community to help shepherd young minds into programming, and I don't have a solid enough grasp on this language", so I went up and I took Bill's training. At the... |
**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah man, and I've got a lot of good questions for you... Because we're all trying to teach people right now at different levels, and you're getting people who have not even programmed before, right? Or by the time they're in one of your classes they've got some programming background...? |
**Todd McLeod:** No, a lot of people have never coded before. I put one course out there on Udemy and I tried to make that as approachable as possible. And truth be told, that's when I was learning the language, so I'd learned some new stuff; my background is econ and business, and some of the nuances of programming th... |
I think Go is a great first language, because it teaches programming fundamentals exceptionally. You have to know how to program to use it, and it also has a lot of room to grow. So it's not like some Mickey Mouse thing - Mickey Mouse is wonderful, but it's just a saying; my son loves Mickey Mouse... But it's not like ... |
**Bill Kennedy:** I love those Udemy videos that you've been doing. I catch them every once in a while, and what's amazing to me - and I'm really interested how you got into this - you'll talk and teach, and then suddenly you just start writing everything that you're doing, and you're jumping around, and then you're wr... |
**Todd McLeod:** Oh, writing? What kind of writing? What do you mean? |
**Bill Kennedy:** You'll say something, and... |
**Todd McLeod:** In the video? |
**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah, in the videos. You're like writing a whole document; by the time you're done with the video, you've got like three pages of notes written down. I've seen that in a few videos, it's really interesting. **Todd McLeod:** That's the thing, man... I'm not quite sure where I'm doing that, but I'm glad... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Let me translate to you - in a minute I'm gonna talk about that also, but let me translate to you where Bill is getting at - what Bill is getting at is are you writing a book about Go? That's what he wants to ask you. |
**Todd McLeod:** Oh, am I writing a book about Go? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** With all those notes...? |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.