Building things that excite you with Charlie Gerard

In this podcast episode, the we discuss a range of topics related to learning and building cool projects. We begin by discussing the recent snow day and share some funny tips and tricks kids use to create a snow day.

Charlie Gerard, a senior dev advocate at Stripe, introduces herself and talks about her role as a creative technologist, primarily working in JavaScript. She shares her love for solo traveling, reading, tinkering, and building. We also discuss Charlie's previous projects and how she comes up with project ideas. She rarely starts from scratch but builds on something she has built before, adding a new sensor or trying a different technology or interaction. We also discuss the challenges of working with sensors and how to connect them to a computer and figure out the different protocols.

ThoughtWorks, a company with a tool called the Radar, helps developers navigate new technologies and decide which to adopt.

We discussed the importance of starting small when learning to code and using games to learn programming. We chat about using ChatGPT for games like D&D, expressing that these games are meant to be fun and not automated.

Charlie can be found on Twitter (https://twitter.com/devdevcharlie), Mastodon (@devdevcharlie@hachyderm.io), and her website https://charliegerard.dev/, and regularly shares cool projects on GitHub under the username charliegerard.

Resources:
- Thoughtworks Radar - https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
- Charlie's projects - https://charliegerard.dev/projects
- Richard's blog post about energy - https://twitchard.github.io/posts/2023-01-18-unicycles.html