The CS Primer Show

Omar Rayward, a Senior Staff Software Engineer who attended an early coding bootcamp, shares his study habits and motivation. Topics include consistent learning routines, transitioning careers from ophthalmology to software engineering, embracing failure, and the importance of mentorship and problem-solving in the workplace.

A podcast discussing packet loss, BGP routing, and troubleshooting network issues with references to historical developments in networking. The episode also explores the significance of nature sounds, live demonstrations in network engineering, and the complexities of autonomous systems in computer networking.

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.

Exploring the inefficiency of waiting in Zoom waiting rooms, nostalgia of 56K modems, personal growth in problem-solving, balancing learning approaches in tech education, achieving flow through skill-challenge matching, the uniqueness of APL as a programming language, and embracing GPT tools for programming success.

We kick off The CS Primer Show with a conversation prompted by our mutual love of "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming. This is an essay that Oz frequently recommends to software engineers who would like to increase their impact. Be sure to watch the talk or read the transcript of Hamming's talk!- You and Your Research (transcript) - You and Your Research (video) - Unix: A History and a Memoir- CS Primer - Bloom's 2 sigma problem- Hoel on aristocratic tutoring- Auren on insiders vs outsiders- Charlie's project to write 52 short stories in a year- Escaping Web: Oz and Charlie's previous engineering interview podcast - American Prometheus (Oppenheimer biography)