The PHP podcast where everyone chimes in.

Originally aired on

February 17th, 2023

086: Education of Development

In this episode of PHPRoundtable, we have a panel of instructor, students, and professional to talk about the Education of Development and Coding. We discuss formal, structure programs to self taught. What is the best was to learn to code? You can join us live in our Discord Channel https://discord.gg/wmD3sGnMMe

with

Sara Golemon
Ben Ramsey
Kaelyn Lang

The Education of Development Show Summary


The Panel

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Shownotes

To add to or modify these show notes please open a PR to show notes for episode 86

Transcript

Eric Van Johnson
Welcome, everybody. We're back episode 86 of the PHP roundtable. This episode is about a topic that's kind of near and dear to me. I've always been fascinated with how people learn to develop. For me to kind of give you a little back story on who I am and how long I've been doing this I've actually been very fortunate, I learned to develop using basic on a trs 80 Cocoa computer a very long time ago, I was fortunate from the perspective of my dad kind of saw the benefit of it and Botha stuff for me. But through all my formal schooling that that I went through, nothing I to do, nothing I do detail today existed, like I couldn't have been taught what I do professionally today, the way I make a living today. I couldn't have been taught it when I was in school.

And so needless to say, I'm a self taught PHP developer, I'm pretty much self taught developer, right. I did do some Fortran and some Pascal in a very short stint, I did it at college, I failed tremendously at Unity college. And

Sara Golemon
the most sort of fundamentally, it was a very popular teaching language in in the olden times of the early 80s. It was actually at the Boys and Girls Club of Southern California. They had a little tear Apple to set up in a little room and they taught that memory is like a big card catalog. And you put all of your data in the little drawers. And when you want to find out what one of the data is you just look for the drawer that you want you pull that drawer open and that's got the data inside of it.

Joe Ferguson
Things that I knew I knew what a cgi bin was. And I was actually reading through the Common Gateway Interface like RFC and spec, and I had a cgi bin book and I had the CGI Bible and I was all about making VB script do cool stuff with CGI. So I managed to land a job at a haircare company that had a pearl shopping cart. And their whole thing was they sold haircare products online, which at in the mid 2000s, was something was okay. It's like, okay, you know, you weren't really fighting against Walmart and Amazon back then. So it was pretty easy to spit up a small little mom and pop.com and sell things. Well, this place here locally, managed to do it very well and had several really good dot coms and had a multimillion dollar business out of this off of this one pearl shopping cart that they probably could have found off of a shareware site. So obviously this thing didn't scale. So one of the things that I was responsible for was figuring out what did scale and the short story there is a custom PHP shopping cart, which turned into a custom PHP integration to other shopping carts, and then consolidating multiple remote shopping carts into one order management system that would leave you begging for something even remotely close to Magento. And, you know, it's it's like I so I come into it from retail. And I also don't come come from a formal education, I learned by tinkering and hacking and breaking things. And I learned by by configuring and tweaking, you can give me a book and I can read it and I'll know some things but I won't be able to actually work with it until I actually won't be able to feel like I know it until I can break it and then fix it.

Ben Rasmey
environment looks like these days for people coming in. I know that there's lots of coding boot camps and that kind of stuff, to help people get started maybe to give them that that that early kind of experimentation and failure.

Experience I don't know. So I would be interested in hearing a little bit more

Ken Marks
I, you know, I, you know, those are both loaded questions. Okay. So going back into the Wayback Machine, what got me into development. My father was a mechanical engineer.

Eric Van Johnson
It's funny, here we go. That was that was, I've been a reader, PHP architect, for four years. I mean, I probably not too long after PHP architect was established and became a reader. A lot of it has to do with some of the things you touched on. As I was teaching myself, I found it, I found that I would go buy books. And as soon as I got the book, because we didn't have an Internet back then. So it was it got the book, like the book was outdated. And PHP architect was like, this monthly magazine that everything was current, like it was current as of that month. And so I really had kind of, you know, gotten into that and kind of used it as like a learning guide on you know, new things in the industry, how people were doing stuff. And so yeah, it to this day, it's a fantastic resource for that. Yeah, that's the ticket. Yeah. Everybody should subscribe to PSP architect, I think. Okay, let's, let's move along. Next we have I don't know if they're one of your students, Kim or not my students. Oh, fantastic. Kailyn Kailyn. Welcome to the panel book, PSP roundtable. Thank you.

I self taught myself all through high school. And like I said, I gotten basic down and all that. But when I gotten into Fortran and COBOL, I realized I'm like, This is not what I want to do for a living like, I don't enjoy this, this is not something that interests me. And so I pretty much stopped. But I'd always kind of continued to continue with my knowledge of development and coding. And I always use that to my benefit. So I got really crazy with like Excel spreadsheets and doing, you know, VB scripting in Excel, and all this other stuff. And I had stumbled onto PHP when I was doing some stuff with an Access database. And a friend of mine said, Hey, you really should look at a true relational database. And at the time, I was on Windows and t in it was Microsoft SQL. And I couldn't afford a license for Microsoft SQL. And so this friend of mine introduced me to open source. He's like, Hey, there's this open source version of Microsoft SQL. It's called MySQL, check it out. I did some research, I found a class in my area that was doing a class on PHP and MySQL. And at the time, I'm like, Well, I don't know what PHP is. But you know, I want to learn MySQL. So let me let me go ahead and get into it. And then I got introduced to PHP. And it literally changed my whole professional trajectory of what I was doing. At that time, I wasn't even doing any sort of development. I was, I was doing water purification. And I was not had no interest in doing computers full time. But I learned php. And I remember going home and telling my wife and we this is it. This is what coding is, to me, this is how I want to be, and just kind of suck my teeth in and then taught myself and this was back. I was fortunate in the fact that I kind of connected with PHP, back when PHP four was just really so this is in like 2000, like late 2000. I think PHP, four was released, like may 2000. And I connect, I started coding with PHP. And it was funny, because I still remember seeing sites that had the extension, PHP three. And that's when I knew I was like, oh, yeah, this is the older version of PHP. I'm on PHP for the newer version. But I was I was fortunate because PHP was very young. And so I learned as PHP learned, and as PHP grew, and as PHP matured, I was able to grow and mature with it. I don't know, I don't know if I would be able to pick it up. I mean, I might be somebody so short, I don't know if I'd be able to step into it and pick it up today. As much more structured as it is. I just like I struggled with object oriented programming when it was introduced into PHP. And it wasn't until I took a break from PHP and tried my hand at Ruby and Rails that I understood object oriented programming because I didn't understand rails. So I had learned object oriented programming to learn rails, and then I was able to apply that back to PHP. And for me, that's that's how I learned it. So I come back to PHP, I had a better understanding of what object oriented programming was, I continue to grow. So, like I said, I'm always curious of how other people have gotten to where they are in their professional careers. As developers or instructors in how the next generation are getting there, and more importantly, what the next generation is seeing as kind of the challenges that they are trying to address becoming developers like what's interesting them, what's driving them? Is that AI? Is it augmented reality? Is it? What is it? Like? Why? Why are you becoming a developer? And how, how important do you think that is? So I'm excited to talk to the panel today. We have a very large panel. I do want to back up a little bit. I know, I haven't been very good at doing roundtables. And I have an initiative to be better at that. I've shared this several times on the show. And on some of the other podcasts I do that when Sammy kind of gifted me PHP roundtable and asked me to kind of steward it for for a while I was very excited because PHP roundtable is always been such a kind of very important part of the PHP community. For me, I probably became became a podcast after kind of watching CMU and seeing what he was doing. So I was very excited. But a lot of other things happen around that same time for me, we ended up taking over operations, a PHP architect, which I like to think PHP architect for sponsoring the show tonight in shows moving forward. And for as long as I work at Php architect which I planned to be a very long time. But we ended up taking over operations, a PHP architect, I had some personal stuff going on where I was selling a house, I was moving at kids graduating from college, there was just a plethora of things piling up on me. And I had told myself that I wasn't going to stress about not being able to get to PSP roundtable because PSP roundtable takes a while to coordinate, we come up with ideas for topics and we go out to the community and find people who are interested in talking about it's not just me and the regular panel getting on and talking to each other. Every month, we try to bring other people and so it takes some effort to put together a panel. And I I didn't want that to be an issue for anxiety and stress for me. So I promised myself that I wouldn't let that happen. In I did. Unfortunately, a year has passed, probably I think since the last show. So I'm at a point in my life personally and professionally, where this is the norm like everything's the norm, I don't have a bunch of different things interjecting. So I'm fitting PHP roundtable into that new norm. And hoping to make this a regular thing I pay. So love this podcast. It's it's I just enjoyed. So hoping this becomes a much more regular thing. With that said, we have a very big panel with us today. We're gonna walk through everybody, we have our regular PHP roundtable panel, people who we will introduce and then we will introduce everybody else. So let's let me start. I'm gonna start with Sarah. Sarah Goldman, one of my favorite people. Hi, Sara.

Sara Golemon
Finally, you take me out of the penalty box where I won't. I won't promote the everyone but Eric podcast on your show.

Eric Van Johnson
I appreciate that. So how did you how did you get into development? What What motivated you? How did you end up where you are today? I know you're you're a little deeper in than we are at like the old is old is pretty sure you're younger than I am. But the language your See, I mean, see, he's been around since the 70s. Right. 7576. So you've been coding and see has, have you always been coding and see is that something you picked up later in life? What?

Sara Golemon
Yeah, no, I mean, it depends on how far back you want to go. Like, we want to talk like all the way back to like, where I got started, where I got started was was basic. It was, you know, like

When I actually got into the working world, I did not go to to Do college for any of this, I had other things going on in my life that did not let me go down the college route. But I did actually need to pay bills and, you know, buy insulin and things like that because America's dystopian hellscape when it comes to health care, but we'll get on that topic later, I did actually know how to use computers very well. Not everybody at that time kind of mid 90s knew really how to use computers to their maximum potential. So I got a really nice sort of easy it job that allowed me to at least be computing adjacent, while I figured out how to kind of like build my wife into something useful. And I fell into a programming role because my manager died in an auto accident, and my coworker who was doing programming got promoted into his role. And so we needed a new programmer, and I had at least vague passing familiarity with how to write things. So I just kind of became the new programmer, I was working for the US government at the time. So you know, you can get away with that sort of thing. There's not a lot of, there wasn't a high bar for getting into a programming job at the time. That's it, let's put it that way.

Eric Van Johnson
So you're geeky enough to you look like you could do it. I could

Sara Golemon
fake it. I could fake it until I made it is literally what I did. And it was it was VB script in Active Server Pages, not ASP. Net, mind you active server pages, which ran VB script, and I knew enough basic that I'm like, okay, I can make sense of this. I can copy a few examples, connect some databases to do some stuff. Bob's your uncle. And that was right at the time, just browsing around the internet, I found PHP and PHP was just God, it was so much easier to work with the ASP, ASP, like I could get things done. But the idioms and the the way you moved it around was just such a pain in the butt. Whereas PHP just got things done. It was that, to quote Terry che, it was a ball of nails, you just throw it something until it sticks. So from there, PHP became my gateway drug, because I'm sitting in IRC helping people use PHP, because I'm really good at the scripting language. And I'm pretending that makes me a programmer. And somebody asked me some silly question about low How do I do logarithms in a base other than 10? Or E, which is all PHP offers? I'm like, oh, that's math. I know, math. Just do this, like, oh, how come I can't do that as an all in ones like, oh, let's build that into language, then how hard could that possibly be? So knowing next to nothing about C, I pop open the source code. I tried to find a log function that's like, oh, it's PHP function log. That's a pretty good int. And I just fake my way through building a patch out of this. And you can find this in the email archives. I'm just like, hey, I want to make your log function a little better. Would you do it? And it was just like, okay, merged. And then the next one was like, hey, you know, you've got another patch here, have a CVS account, and just start the PHP was. That was three Oh, 18. I want to say, through what Tim was the first one was using this might have been four Oh, something I'm not sure. But it's just been this, this avalanching sort of, like, falling into the next thing and the next thing, because before, you know, like, oh, okay, I get the idioms of C now, I can figure out how to do this. And it's just reading documentation and reading RFCs and it's like, oh, well, I need I want to do C++ now. So let's fake art, fake it until we make it in C++. And, you know, next thing you know, I you know, I'm getting

Eric Van Johnson
caught up on Merce.

Sara Golemon
i Yes, you bring this up, because you're jealous of it.

Eric Van Johnson
I am so envious of them that's like, such like,

Sara Golemon
how many It is bizarre to think about right? I had a patch I put in a tiny little patch to curl and because they use curl in the pre severance helicopter insight helicopter whether that means technically I have code that's on Mars works for

Eric Van Johnson
me you don't have to go into details you just say I have code on Mars to be one line who knows who cares

Sara Golemon
it's it's it's a it has a minimal number of lines Yeah, so that's how I got into programming was a whole bunch of happy accidents. All right, let's let's change school kids because that does not scale. Hey, Joe.

Joe Ferguson
Hello. Speaking of staying in school and things I didn't do was stay in school school and Eric story seems very familiar to me because it's very close to my story is I was working retail and wanted to get into working computers had taught myself enough basic and enough scripting language.

Eric Van Johnson
Cool. All right, let's bring in Mr. release manager of PHP 8.1. In 8.2, Ben Ramsey. Hi, Ben.

Ben Rasmey
Hi. I was trying to unmute myself and I was typing him into the chat instead. Oh, hi. I think yeah, I think that my story is going to be very similar to all of you. So this is

Eric Van Johnson
I want to point out real fast if I can interrupt you, all of our stories are very similar. And all of us have gray hair. So there might be a connection I in

Ben Rasmey
there might there actually might be a connection. And I'll bring something up about that in just a minute. But yes, going way back and haircare products. Yep, yeah, I'm going to promote my own line of haircare products. And I'm going to know, going way back, I started very similarly. I think my parents kind of decided they wanted to get something for me, kind of like what you were talking about Eric. And so they got they got me an Atari 400. I don't know if anyone knows what that is. But it was a keyboard with a little cartridge thing. And they made two versions of it. There was the 400 and the 800. The 800 had actual like, keys. And the 400 was like, like a flat pad. It was like a McDonald's. Well, they don't do these fast food restaurants anymore. But they used to have these flat plastic panels. With buttons, you'd press but they were just flat buttons. So that's, that's what it was. But it had a BASIC cartridge and a cassette deck. And I had gotten some of those you know, books that actually had all of the programs written down on paper, and you would just write the programs, copy them, type it in. And I guess the first program I can really remember making this is back in the late 80s It was a madlib generator, I created a madlib generator. And when you ran it, it would prompt you at the command prompt for like, enter a noun into a verb into an adjective and then at the very end, would take all that together and print out a story with all the variables in place. So have a lot of fun with that. But if you fast forward to my high school and then early college years, I did not think I was going to be a programmer. That was never something that crossed my mind. I oddly enough thought I was going to work in church. And you probably wouldn't know that from me by now. But But I So yeah, that's what I was kind of heading toward But when I was in high school, I started my school's first website. And I was tinkering around with lots of web stuff. I enjoyed it, it was a hobby. And I guess at the time, I didn't think your hobby could be your career. It just never crossed my mind. I got into college, I had some friends. And one day a friend of mine said, Hey, you're, you're good with the web stuff. I actually made the website for a band I was in, because I was in a band as as you do. And I, he had seen that. And he said, Hey, my brother is starting a web agency or a web company. And he's looking for a programmer. So I talked to him, I started doing that. I was doing what they now call classic ASP, that's what you were talking about Sarah, and Joe, where you're coding and VB script. And we were using Access databases in production, as you do, and FTP to upload all that stuff. And what I learned in college, or what I was going to college for, was an English education degree. And I ended up one of my professors gave me one of the best pieces of pieces of advice anyone's ever given me. And he was an English professor. But he was also the CTO of like the English professor association of Georgia, or something, I don't know how that works. But he was really big into technology at the time. And I guess he still is, I don't know, but but he told me one day, he pulled me aside and said, Hey, Ben, you're going to have to do student teaching. Next semester, and at this time, I was already working full time at a web agency. And he said, You're gonna have to quit your job to do student teaching. And I don't understand why you would do that. He was like, you enjoy doing that, you're making money doing that. If you have to come back and teach, you can always come back and teach on a provisional basis, while you're getting your certification. So you said I would advise you to drop out of the education part of your degree, and just finish the English part, the English literature, and, and continue doing what you're doing. So that's what I did, and haven't looked back. And that was really great advice. I wanted to come back to the gray hair part, I've been giving this a lot of thought and I, I kind of do want to hear some of the other people who will be joining us in a minute, talk about this. But at the time that we that Sara and Eric and Joe and I were coming into the industry, it was, in my opinion, I think it was much easier for someone who had no background like that to get in. And it was also very easy in small shops to do that. And maybe it still is today, I really don't know. But there was a lot of leeway. There was a lot of room for error and and, you know, screwing things up and learning and that way. And that's really kind of how I learned. Actually, one of the my first experiences with PHP involves me taking down our server for a week. That's a long story. I can get into it with you sometime. But But yeah, we suffice to say, like, I decided to install it, and I completely screwed up Apache configuration settings. I didn't know what I was doing. But, and we had clients whose websites were being served from that server. It was a production server. So but I continued to work there for a few more years. And it was kind of things like that, that we had the ability to do and learn on the job as we were doing it. I'm not sure what the

from people who are in school today. About that.

Eric Van Johnson
All right, well, let's, let's move on to that we're going to bring on here we, we got some instructors, and then we got some young pups. And some of these guys, some of these people are very young, it freaks me out, man. Okay, so next day on the panel, we're gonna bring in kid marks. Ken marks is a author. He's authored a PHP web development with MySQL. He's also a contributor to PHP architect. He's done a couple of feature articles with us. And on top of that, he is the he's teaching it programming at Madison Area Technical College. Welcome to the roundtable. Kim. Thank you, Eric.

Ken Marks
Yeah. So and I am old. So,

Eric Van Johnson
what got you involved here? What got you into development? And then what? Why would you ever think it was a good idea to teach development?

Ken Marks
And when I was 10, he brought home. I think it was a birthday present. And this was back in 75. He brought me home. Wait, 73 sorry. Anyways, he brought me home a RadioShack 65 and one kid, Google that. So, and I think within a week, I'd had done all 65 projects. And we're starting to invent my own. And that was my initial interest is I was very much into tinkering. I liked building things. I did model aviation as a kid. And then fast forward to my, I want to say my sophomore year in high school. I was working a part time job and I saved my money up and I bought myself a trash at computer. Know what that is?

Eric Van Johnson
Okay. Oh, yeah. I just said I started off with the cocoa man. I know. I know the radio.

Ken Marks
So model one. Yeah. Model One. Okay. And so I was typing in basic. I taught myself basic. I was waiting with bated breath every month for the TRS 80 magazine that came out. And I would I even paid my brother to key in, like a penny line. I was I was,

Eric Van Johnson
I was gonna say Coco's had the cocoa magazine. And that was like the thing you'd go get cocoa magazine, start flipping through the pages and just copying and what was it? Magazine? Yeah, I love the saving

Ken Marks
it. Yeah, it saving it to your cassette drive. So, um, so that really got my interest going in encoding. My dad had even brought home before that this thing that looked like a paper slide rule that allowed you to create opcodes kind of assembly language like to put things together. So I really always loved the puzzle aspect of putting stuff together. And so you would think, you know, I knew I actually knew I wanted to be an engineer. I did, but I hated school. I absolutely. See. And so we get to the point of why would I would never have thought I would be an instructor especially even 15 years ago, okay. That never would have crossed my mind because I was like the last person that that liked formal education. Okay, and so I my parents told me, my junior year if you don't screw off, you know, we'll send you to college. And of course, I didn't listen to him and I screwed off. And so then I joined the Navy instead. So I got electronics training in the in the US Navy. Did a long stint in San Diego. And I when I got out of the Navy I did six years in the Navy I got a job as a as an electronics technician and through so I worked for various companies in Southern California that did disk tape manufacturing for Digital Equipment Corporation if you can remember them which they're no longer around Deck and I was I was doing, creating a burnin chamber where you had to bring up the temperature of circuit boards up and down for a whole of in a cycle. Oh, and I wrote this code in basic. Okay, so I knew basic and, and then I was like this, this stinks, I need to like network is starting to be a thing. I need to learn C programming language. So I went and I took a class at the local community college Fullerton Community College on SSI. And when I went to go sign up, they said, Well, you need calculus before you can take this class and I said, Aren't your community college? They said, bring a note from your employer. So I brought a note from my employer. And they said, Okay, great. So I loved it. I got an A in it. And then I talked to my wife, and I said, and my wife, so I was newly married, she has a mechanical engineering degree. And I, I said, Hey, how do you feel about me going to school? Would you put me through it? So she's like, Heck, yeah. I'm tired of working as an engineer in a man's world. And I, so I went, and I got my comp sci degree, I started out at the community college. So I went a non traditional student route. And I did two years at Cal at Fullerton, college, and then transferred into Cal State Fullerton and got my comp sci degree. And then I started working in the industry now the interest and so I started writing C at this other place. And then while I was going to school, I got a part time job at Beckman instruments, writing embedded code for their blood analyzers. So that my career to be and my, my father kept challenging me, you should, you need to get a degree to do that kind of coding. And I'm like, I know, you can do it without the degree. But it's gonna be really hard to get a promotion, blah, blah, blah, and he's of that general generation. So they succumb to the pressure, and I, and I got my degree. And then so I worked mostly in the medical device manufacturing industry for my career, mostly doing embedded development, blood analyzers, radiation treatment, planning software, and then most my recent gig before I got into teaching was at GE Healthcare, writing code for anesthesia machines and Critical Care ventilators. And I left the company, I was the their business conductivity, technical guy. So transferring medical, medical conductivity, device data to electronic healthcare records. And then I got, I took the Java class at the community college, just because I wanted to learn Java. I want to say, five, six years before I actually got the job. No, it was more than that was like 10 years. And I had an instructor challenged me there. He said, Have you ever thought about teaching? And my response was, Well, if I want to cut my salary in half, I, maybe I will. And so I didn't think much about it until I was thinking I would do it as a step down to retirement. And so that's your next question is why would I get into into teaching right? at GE, we, so we're in close proximity to UW Madison. And they have a bio engineering program and a computer engineering computer science program there. And so we took on a lot of interns there. And one day, my boss came to me and said, Hey, we've got these extra interns, do you want to take one on to be a mentor? And I'd like sure, I'll do that. And I was on a new conductivity project. And it was incredibly rewarding to work with these students, because they were like sponges. And they and so it's like, I had a student, all they knew was Java. And I said, Okay, I'll tell you what, write this test code, because we got to do this test program in Java, but I want you to learn C++. I just threw them a book. And then they would, I would meet with them once a week. I mean, I didn't know anything about teaching, right? It's like, and we would meet and I would see the process of how they were learning and I would like oh, okay, so, you know, Java, this is how you would do it in C++, you know, etc. So, my career was mostly a C C++ programmer. And in fact, you had mentioned this Eric you struggle with with object oriented programming, I kid you not it took me three tries to really understand Oh, because my head was so grounded in a procedural way of programming that I I had the hardest time really understanding the difference between an instance and the actual code, the you know, the template if you will And so when I got that, that's when it all clicked for me. So, and then I've been teaching for 10 and a half years. I walked into PHP, sort of as an accident. And my background, as you could tell is not web development, right? So my, my program director said, Hey, would you teach php? And I said, No. And why not? Well, I'm not a web developer. And so, actually, my department had said that, and then my, my program director came to me and says, you know, we teach web development. That's, you know, you got to stop saying that. And I said, Yeah, that's probably bad for him. And so he kept after me, and he said, I'll send you to a boot camp. And I was like, I don't need to go to a boot camp, I need to hang out with web developers to find out what do web developers do that are different than software engineers? Nothing. It's the same thing. And so I got into teaching php. And I got really disillusioned with like, books were either really good from an pedagogical standpoint, and horrible from the code perspective, or they were great from the code perspective, but they taught it in a vacuum in outside of how web development really works. And that's kind of what motivated me to, to write the book, which I know you didn't ask me. But when Oscar who asked me to write the book, I didn't even know who he was. I said, Why would I want to write a book that some editor told me I had to write just to sell copies? And then I said, What do you do? PHP.

Eric Van Johnson
So you weren't new to this right. Or me? I'll let you explain. But your student, correct.

Kaelyn Lang
Yeah. I'm a student at Madison Area Technical College.

Eric Van Johnson
Okay, what what got you involved? Like, why? Why are you going down this path?

Kaelyn Lang
So I started. I guess it kind of started a long time ago, like fifth grade, they brought out a big book of like careers. And I had an epiphany in that moment that somebody had to make video games, right. And so I was like, that's what I want to do. It's not in book. But that's what I want to do. So I went, and that was what I was determined to do. I started getting into code. In my freshman year of high school, I think I started with like batch programming. It was the simplest thing I could find to teach myself, did a little bit of HTML, and then went to college for game design. Art. So I went into the art side I was coding was my backup, because I knew I was good enough at it. I took some web design classes, learned more HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And still had like this thing. Like I fell in love with web design. I'm like, this is going to be in my back pocket in case I can't get into the game industry. Fun fact, you can't get into the game industry. So I am now sitting here, you know, I was I was out of school for like four years now. And I had a job and just office assistant stuff. And I'm like, You know what, I want to actually do something with the web stuff. Can't get a job without a degree. So I'm going to school again to get that front end development degree. To be able to be like, hey, I can actually do this

Eric Van Johnson
in well, let me say, Let me save some of those questions for for the group. So okay, cool. All right. Let's move on. Next, we're going to introduce, let me let me pull up there. There's just a check. Where's your wish to stay here? Let me bring up we have Jack. Jack got to find your screen. Well, well, our panel is filling up here. Jack. I'm gonna butcher your last name Paul of the Holika Holika. The clinical assistant professor at Boise State in the games, interactive media and mobile, do you pronounce that Jim?

Jack Polifka
Again, again, kept doing it.

Eric Van Johnson
I mean, I had a 5050 chance of being right and as always got it wrong.

Sara Golemon
It's just not give us a little bit.

Jack Polifka
Um, yeah, so my interest in computing really got started when I was in high school, my friends were really big gamers. I got heavily influenced in with games like Diablo two, Warcraft, three Dota, all that stuff. So when I was in high school back in 2005 2006, that seems like such a long time ago. Um, I took web development classes in high school. And then when I was off to apply for, or when I was going to apply for college, there was this degree. So I'm from Wisconsin. So hey, Ken Taylor Kailyn, I actually went from I went to the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point for my four year degree in Web and Digital Media Development. Learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, I got to learn PHP during my junior year while I was there, I got to do a really cool internship with Aaron serais, who taught me a lot about the language. And that kind of started my trajectory to doing PHP 2010, I finished. And then I got a job during the summer of 2011, doing PHP for a e commerce website in Chicago metropolitan area called optic plant.com. They did PHP 5.3. I learned a lot about programming software development, my head just exploded. When I originally went to college, I thought I was gonna be doing front end like entering content on a website. But then I learned backend programming, and I ended up somehow becoming a software developer. It was it was not a path that I was expecting. After two and a half, three years in Chicago, I actually moved over to middle of Iowa to go to Iowa State University. I did a master's. For a year and a half, I did human computer interaction. My research was developing web systems for measuring what people know in the chemistry classroom and what sort of pictures they look at. After I finished that, I worked full time for the university. And I earned my PhD while doing it. My PhD researchers in the same stuff. So I had about 10 years of doing PHP there. And now I actually work for Boise State University teaching. I no longer work with PHP. I do know Jasmine said on the back end. So that's my experience really short and sweet. Cool.

Eric Van Johnson
Here we go. Let's meet Missouri. Alright, we have i We're almost an hour in and we're still not through introductions here. But we have more Boise State people we want to we want to bring on next we have Adam gills who is a students? Well, yeah. Right over here. Yeah. They're student of the gym. GIMs Gibbs program, right?

Adam Giles
Yeah. Yeah, that's correct. I am currently a junior within the game program here at Boise State University. And with that, kind of, I'll make it short and sweet, sort of my experience. But I grew up in a very small farm town during my time in high school. And with that, programming was not the biggest thing that was on people's minds when in high school. But when I came to Boise State, that was sort of my introduction, so I'm fairly fresh into programming and sort of this game development industry. So I would say about three years in, found my first gray hair the other day, Ben, so we're kinda so the stress is cable reward. I can almost guarantee but um, yeah, so it's been a really fun experience. And something that I will say about just GIMP in general here at Boise State University is that games is sort of that main appeal Go towards it. But we're really a major that focuses on emerging technology. So we cover a lot of different stuff such as augmented and virtual reality. But kind of what Jack teaches. We talked about also back end and front end development. And we do a little bit of 3d modeling. So it's a very generalist, program and major that gets people you know, get their feet wet in a lot of different industries. So yeah, that's been my experience so far.

Eric Van Johnson
Oh, and last, but not least, I'm sure I will butcher their name as well. We have Derrick Pat pite pirate, pirate. Ah, you're another Boise State person.

Derek Pyatt
Yes. Like Adam. I'm also a junior in, in game at Boise State. And my interest in programming goes back to probably high school as well. I think that my friends and I towards the beginning of high school would always go on Chrome when we weren't when we're supposed to be doing anything but classwork, we would inspect, sorry, inspect element, and try and manipulate websites to do whatever we wanted. That was my first exposure to any sort of programming. And it really motivated me to try and find something to do in tech. From there, I didn't really get to get to experience too much programming until I went to Boise State like Adam. And now in the GIMP program, I've been able to accomplish a lot and learn far more programming than I ever could on my own. And I have officially earned the title of table dropper as, as in in my my to sit in one of my gym classes, I made the mistake of dropping the entire classes table while doing an exercise. Just to kind of see if I understood how SQL really worked.

Eric Van Johnson
Listen, we might not all admit it, but I can almost guarantee you everybody on this panel has dropped a table or two. So welcome to the club.

Ben Rasmey
An entire database.

Derek Pyatt
I haven't got there yet. But we'll see.

Eric Van Johnson
All right. So we've gotten through introducing everybody now I guess the most pressing question I have is Boise State. What's up with your football field? Why is it blue? It is so difficult to watch your games. It's so hard.

Adam Giles
We try to stand out from the crowd here, Eric, we're trying to be unique, and we're trying to be different. And sometimes the players blend in with the field. But we get over that issue. You know, it's just

Eric Van Johnson
part of the whole thought behind it.

Adam Giles
Well, it's it's not just a football game. It's also like a Where's Waldo kind of game, you got to find the players out on the field and just you know, have have some fun there. So for the people that not too interested in football, they have a little side game. So. So what I'm hearing is camouflage. Yes, exactly. That makes it difficult for the enemy teams, you know, get us. So

Eric Van Johnson
strategy. So I hear a lot. And I heard it a few times here as well. Gaming seems to be like this driving motivation for a lot of people to take up development. Just curious, like, Why do you think that is? Do you think he's just like, everybody has this like, fantasy of you'll be writing the next big Unreal Engine or writing the next big game? Or, you know, because I know for me, maybe it's kind of the same thing for me. I remember being in junior high, and we had a sit at this. At that time, there were no terminology typed in this green and white paper. in it. It asks you a couple questions, you answered it and kind of spat out what it thought you should do for a living like what your profession should be. And I remember for me, it was like a police officers, like, just about everybody was like a police officer or something like that. And I remember when that happened, something triggered in my brain where it's like, no, I want to know how that just did that. Like, I want to understand how that did that. Like how did how did they ask me questions? And how did it take my response? And that kind of was the was the genesis of me going down? This this rabbit hole of computers and programming and all that. Do you think it's like the similar thing with the younger generation in game development? It's like, okay, I enjoy playing this game, but I really want to understand how this is happening.

Adam Giles
Yeah, I think I think I think I can jump in on that. You know, as somebody that has played games his entire life, it's something that you're really drawn to and it becomes a part of you. Um, Almost. And I think as somebody that consistently plays game and talking with other students within the game department, you kind of everybody wants to make the next million dollar IP, everybody want to make, you know, the next Call of Duty or the next whatever popular game there is. And I think with that it's a lot of some people are just really interested in seeing how everything works all together and wanting to break that down step by step. And some people just have an eye for it. I think sort of looking at a game and being like, Oh, well, maybe it can look different this way. Or maybe it can run different this way, it would be better this way. And, you know, you see that in a lot of gaming communities. There's a lot of, you know, Discord channels or community Reddit pages that sort of talk about, you know, this is what can be improved. Here's some people that have done it. And that's done through, like, mod support or anything else like that. And so I think, I think some people just have a keen eye to it.

Sara Golemon
add on to that, because because you guys are both talking about like the understanding how things work and getting into the algorithms. But like games as a specific, like, attractor there is like, you know, nobody's gonna sit down and thinking like, wow, I just, I can't wait to collate some numbers, man. Like, I just, I want to get those TPS cover sheet. Like, that's my jam, like, very few, I will say that. But very few people, I think are really enticed by that. But we can all gather around games and the idea of either either social games, because we're working with people, or even just personal challenge games, where we're like, Okay, I gotta get that pixel to the next line up. And just that exciting thing. I never really had in mind that I was going to go into game development personally. But again, like, as I said, at the start, like my, my trajectory really wasn't even programming. For the longest time, it was just something connected to computers, I actually had EA, electrical engineering more in mind, when I got started. There was a game in the 80s called Rockies boots. I don't know if anyone has ever heard of this, but it was a beautiful logic gate based game. But I still felt that sort of attraction of the idea of building games, to the point that I have this vivid memory in my head of being like 1213, maybe 14 years old, writing a letter to John Carmack asking for advice on how to get into game dev. And it was like online paper in pencil. And I had addressed the envelope and pencil and I put it in the mailbox and never wrote me back. John Carmack and a very upset about it. Games are skins are an easy thing to develop around.

Eric Van Johnson
So I guess for the instructors here, I touched on it a little bit about my journey and development. And in, you know, like, when I would go get material, as soon as I got material, it felt like it was out of date. And I remember seeing that. When I I did venture back into community college later in life. And when I wanted to move forward with my understanding of computers, and I felt like the same way like I felt at that time, all the programs were still like behind what the real world was doing with computers. How challenging to it. Can you even touched on this as far as the material you looked at initially? Is that still a problem? Like, do these formal college sort of level? Programs? Do they still struggle to stay current with new technology? You're muted, Ken.

Ken Marks
Thank you. Again. Ah, yeah, I think so. I think that that many still do, I know that there are, I mean, like, the GIMP program is definitely a good effort, you know, to move out of a traditional math based approach. So computer science started from the mathematics department. And when I was going to school, they are just transferring it to the engineering now. department. You have the other problem is you have to jump through a tremendous amount of hoops to even get to some of your core 200 300 level classes. Like you have to take, well, you got to take a couple semesters of physics and some calculus and you know, not everybody can can do that. Not everybody is really good at that. Like, I sucked at math. And if somebody would told me that I was going to get a math minor as a result of getting a computer science degree, I might have run from the building screaming. I mean, I basically tolerated math is is what I did. So, I it's not a necessity, like what we teach at our two year program is we don't teach a lot of theory, we teach really what they need to know. And we're even like, like, do we even need to tell them that the computer is a bunch of switches with ones and zeros? I mean, we we tell them that, but we just like you don't really need to know. And then we try, we get them coding, you know, they get two years of experience in coding from day one in that program, so by the time they're ready to go to work, they've got two years experience in coding. So I The other aspect, and I think maybe this is an aspect from Camille and not to poopoo, the four year university because I'm a product of that. I think it's I definitely think that some universities are doing a better job and modernizing. But I think they need to get away from this rite of passage that you need to take calculus to be able to do well. I think that many students, I was going to touch on this when you said what is the motivator? You know, it's like is games or game development? A motivator? Yeah, absolutely. What else are motivators? Money? That's a motivator. Okay, especially for non traditional starting salaries in our area are probably about 65k 60 65k. And that's graduating from a two year two year school. That's good. What our students do a really good job self selecting, I mean, the statistics I read is 2% of the population can do what we do, you have to be a good puzzle solver. I mean, maybe it's somewhere more than that. But let's face it, if we all have friends that if we said, hey, if you ever would consider being a developer, they would run from the building screaming, they're usually pretty, you know, we have friends that wouldn't even consider doing something that like that. But we also have friends that love solving puzzles and love doing this stuff, right? So I try to take that motivation that a student has and try to redirect it. But getting back to your question is like, I think we could do a better job on keeping the students interest early, when they when they get into the program, I think that all of us can do a better job at that.

Sara Golemon
I think you hit on something really important there when you talked about the relationship of, of math to programming, and I don't know if you said it specifically, but I felt like it was kind of underneath there is that, you know, understanding the the the, the academic fundamentals of thing aren't necessarily necessary to being able to use the thing. There are plenty of web application developers out there who can think very critically and to fine design very good systems that are good UIs, who are really not pros at math, and that's okay, because you kind of don't need to be for a lot of tasks. And I've got a friend in the chat right now, who knows, I'm talking directly to him. Because I had to explain to him that a number divided by negative one was a negative number. But that's okay, because he's very good at the job that he does elsewhere. So it's yeah, it's important to, to separate that an academic concept of what goes into programming because like, you know, do you need to know how NPN transistor, you know, reacts and transports electrons across the P material? No, you don't actually need to know that. You need to know that I can iterate over this container and do stuff. And that will make it output of what the end user wants.

Ben Rasmey
In terms of keeping up with like, the latest information, and being relevant. I have an interesting story from when I said, several years into my career, this is around 2005. I decided after going to several interviews, where they were asking specifically, you know, why don't you have a degree in computer science? I thought, well, maybe I need one. So I I started a master's program and went into try to get you know, a computer science degree that way. I don't know maybe if a couple semesters in, we I was taking a class it was a Java class. And the professor proclaimed to us, this isn't 2005 that Java applets were the future of web development. And I don't remember those but But in 2005, they were already on the way out. And like Flash was taking over the role that Apple it would have had, like 10 years before. So I, I lost interest quickly in that program, and dropped out and finally finished paying off the student loans last year. So. So I am one one student who decided that I didn't want to be in that program, I think, can you were mentioning that? Like how something about you know, how did how do we keep the students kind of interested in that? So yeah, that was, that's an example of where, like, I lost interest, then, like, I didn't think that the school could teach me what I needed to learn anymore, or I lost, I guess, trust and faith in them.

Eric Van Johnson
That's a great point. Oh, go ahead.

Jack Polifka
Sorry, I was really, I just want to say, cancer event, they all make really good points. Computer Science, I think about computer science on a spectrum of, of the theory. And then the applied in computer science is such a big field that you have to cover all of it. But I think a lot of the stuff that we're discussing here is on the applied side, it's really abstracted away from what we really need to know in order to do the work we do. Knowing that stuff is important for sure. Once it gets started, we don't need to start making stuff and seeing like, Hey, I just typed in 20 lines of code, I made something cool like a website are, I remember when I first learned PHP, I was playing Dungeons and Dragons, I made a lot of wonder, using case and I'm like, oh my god, this is so cool, I can press a button, and then it does a random effect for my playgroup. Um, and I think we need to move towards something that gets people really interested in what they're doing. Because without that, how are they going to continue learning in trying to keep up with content. I think GIMP does a good job of that. But we're not on the bleeding edge. Of course, we can't be because we're not developers, we do our best by trying to create an environment in which the students are more engaged with their projects, because a lot of what we do is hands on project based, and hopefully then doozy as encourages them to go and try new things that we may not have covered in the classroom. We can do so much, but there's only a set amount of time in in the semester in a year in a curriculum. So we can try to get them so far. But then hopefully that interest will push them farther.

Eric Van Johnson
Right. And that's a great point. I think. So you had your hand up. But let me just throw it out there because I do want to talk to the students there. You know, I feel weird calling your students but I guess we will, we'll keep that I keep your categories is that for now, the students out there, a couple of things have been touched on the first thing, don't don't get the scourge for going to college. Like, I feel like a lot of us kind of leaning that way. But how do you feel about what's being said? Like, do you feel the programs you're in are? Are, it'd be difficult for you guys to maybe make this assessment. But do you feel like they are properly prepared? Like, are you getting out of the programs, what you had hoped to get out of the programs? We went down this path? Adam, since you had your hand up? We'll start with you.

Adam Giles
Yeah, yeah, I'll go ahead and start just sort of echoing what Jack was saying earlier. And before I get into that question, but what I'll talk about with getting in my experience so far is that it really facilitates, like a major that's for community, that it's strong. And making sure that us as students bond together, whether that be doing individual projects that are outside of class time. We host like game sessions in which we you know, play video games, and then we also make video games. So it gets us some experience and doing you know, what we're actually learning in our classrooms and, you know, applying it to our own outside lives outside of class. And then I think going to your question, Eric, about these programs preparing us, I think they are, you know, especially with gaming, what I've experienced so far, and what I've experienced in Jack's classes as a former student of Jack and as a teaching assistant of Jack, I've seen that gimp really pushes students to, you know, work through the troubles and work through the obstacles and not be given the direct answer right away, but rather, you know, reaching out to colleagues and reaching out to peers, to then, you know, brainstorm ideas together on how to fix a solution. You know, why isn't my code working? Let's not just beg for the answer right away. Let's let's talk to some people and let's See, you know, other experiences that somebody else might have had? Or let's do my own research? And let's see, you know, what's this error that's popping up right now on line 97? Let's throw it into Google. And let's check it out real quick and see what's coming back. So I think, you know, particularly with GIMP, and from a student's perspective, I appreciate not being told the answer right away. I feel like if I'm just giving an answer, or if I'm just working straight out of a textbook, I'm not, I'm not going to learn as much. It's sort of the it's sort of the pain and suffering experience that then turns into bigger lessons. And, yeah, that's what I'll say about the program so far.

Derek Pyatt
You're to pile on top of what Adam and Jack were both saying, I think GIMP does do a good job of preparing students. And one thing that I think it teaches that maybe not other computer science programs, but will give you the opportunity to learn is how to teach yourself and how to go into Google and spend time on Stack Overflow and read documentation and figure out a solution to a problem that you're having. Where if you were to just ask a teacher and like Adam was saying, get an answer immediately, what am I going to learn, I have to be able to have the time to try and work it out myself. And I think that's a skill that can be applied to any field in tech, no matter where you go out starting from computer science.

Eric Van Johnson
Really never do.

Kaelyn Lang
Um I think the program I'm currently in is doing a better job of preparing students. But as a student, I have also had to develop the drive the motivation to want to continue to do this. Right, like I didn't, I wanted to go into games, I'm now in web development. Why? Because I want to be able to make things I want to be able to do things on my own. And a lot of my classes have been project based, which I've appreciated, because it's a lot easier than you know, taking a test taking a quiz to be like, Oh, do you know the information? Well, no, I don't know what every little thing is called because the vocabulary slips me but I can write the code, I can make it work.

Eric Van Johnson
Right.

Kaelyn Lang
So I think it's the way it's structured to have more application rather than theory, I think works a lot better in this case.

Eric Van Johnson
That's great. It was funny to hear you guys talk about StackOverflow and Google. It's not a huge secret. But that is so much of our life as professional developers. Our is Google and Stack Overflow. I mean, no matter how good you are, you still reach for those tools to this day. And I I'm just blown away where we're going to be with that. In the next year with things I chat GBT, and who are kind of like, stepping into that, like becoming the next level of that Google and Stack Overflow, where chat, GBT will just like write code for you, if you ask it nicely enough. So yeah, these are all tools that weren't readily accessible for a lot of us when we started in this industry, that have really kind of changed that that entire field and made us all we joke about it, right? We joke about how it makes us lazier developers because all we do is look stuff up. But it's given us all that that that ability to look at problems realize that they are solvable, realize that these errors, you're not the only one experiencing this error late. There's a whole stack overflow, about that era that people have talked about and how to fix it. So it's interesting to hear that can

Ken Marks
you kind of just touched on it is that, you know, you know, one way to look at things is to say, oh, people think we're lazy, because we just look stuff up. But, you know, you've also heard the adage that a lazy programmer is a good programmer, as one of the best. The best. And so when you look at a lot of the things when you start out, like when we teach our intro to programming class, we teach them the long way to do something, and then we show them a more convenient way of doing it next. Right. And because we for several reasons, a we don't want to overwhelm them cognitively. Okay. And then we want them to be able to form a connection on the abstract concepts as they're as they're learning, sequential logic, conditional logic, looping logic modularization. But the other thing is that it's really, really important for, like, what are the things like kale, you've probably heard me say this in class. If, if you want to be frustrated for a little bit, teach somebody how to use Microsoft Excel, right? If you want to be frustrated for a lifetime, teach somebody how to program. And that's this, the people who become the best programmers, the Rockstar programmers are the one who embrace frustration. They're the people who like board games. They're the ones who like puzzles, they're the ones who like, who, who just can't get up until they solve that, that problem. You know, because it's just, they got it, they got to figure it out. And part of that is figuring out like, when, like, one of the things we we teach our students is we don't give them the answer. We we say, what's broken? How do you know it's broken? Where's it broken? How would you figure out it's broken? We asked them a lot of questions. What are you going to do to isolate that? Et cetera, et cetera. And so they learned to the degree they can learn and become more proficient in their debugging skills. That's the degree that they're going to be better coders.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, and I heard, I think Kailyn mentioned motivation. I am definitely one of those people who look at development as like an art form. And I'm always curious about people's like, how do they stay inspired and motivated to keep coding, especially for our new students? Do you guys find that challenging it I, I know for, for us old timers, we've definitely had those moments where we've kind of feel like we've run out of steam and needed something to kind of get us going again. But I know, when I first started doing this, I couldn't get enough of it. Like, I just couldn't stop. I always wanted to code. Is it still like that? Like, do you just like have this passion for it where you want to continue coding? Or do you just kind of meet that you still you're looking for like inspiration and how to get you to the next level.

Kaelyn Lang
So for me, I'm definitely more of a creative person. So I am constantly coming up with ideas, I can't help it just that's that's how it works.

Eric Van Johnson
I apologize. It just

Kaelyn Lang
I have I have so many ideas. But never enough time in my life. Even if I were to make every single one to perfection. i There's just so many things that drive me forward. So many projects, personal things that I just want to do. And create. It's just I don't have the skills yet. And I think that's what drives me is being able to do these personal projects, being able to come up with these ideas, being able to create something on my own, to then drive me to be like, oh, I want to do the next thing. I can use things from this previous project that I learned to better. The next thing I make.

Eric Van Johnson
Great point, Adam.

Adam Giles
Yeah, I think I agree with you know, everything Caitlin has said, pretty much it's it's one of those things. I'm also a very creative person. And I find myself sketching in a sketchbook a lot of the times of, you know, what I want to do and what do I want to apply? And how can I make something look good. And so I find myself consistently thinking of new ideas of how I can update a website, or, you know, this is this is another website I can make or something like that. But I agree where as a student, it's hard to find that time outside of, you know, courses, and then also work. So it's important that you dedicate time to yourself to teach yourself some of these things too, if you want to, you know further your knowledge. And so that's something that I know I sometimes struggle with, but I always find myself motivating, you know, individually to keep pushing forward because I want to make something better and I want to make something look more appealing and so I just try my best to push through it.

Ben Rasmey
Yeah, this made me remember something that that same professor I mentioned earlier, who gave me the good advice. He taught a class called the principles of teaching writing. And also there was like a grammar for middle grades or something like that. In those classes, one of the things I remember learning is that When you're teaching students how to write, you don't really want to throw a whole bunch of like the grammar things at them, you, they don't have to be like what they write doesn't have to be perfect. Always. And in fact, you know, when you're creative writing, you don't always follow the rules of grammar anyway, not not to a tee. But his point was really, as a student, like, you just want them to write, you want to get them writing. So they journal every day, that was his big thing. And like, make them journal, write a page or two every day, it doesn't matter what it's about. And over time, what you'll see happen is they will start needing to know some of those rules. And they will realize that there's new things that they need to go learn, and then incorporate into what they're writing. And that's always stuck with me, because I think Kailyn, you, you alluded to something like to this is that, like, I don't know, the skills right now, I don't, I don't have those skills right now, but I'm learning them. And as you're programming, you'll see things like, oh, I don't really know how to do that. But now's the time to go, go grab that and pull it in and, and then assimilate it into what I'm building. So I think that that's, that's just the way people I think a lot of people learn anyway. But it's, it's always, like, stuck with me that that kind of like students. And, you know, not just students, but everyone's a student, like lifelong. But as you're developing your skills, you don't always have the skills you need, right then. And when you come to that point, you go off and learn it.

Sara Golemon
A good follow up to that is sort of what happens after that, after you've learned it after you've implemented it. Because I think a lot of you know, mid range and senior devs out there will recognize this, some of the worst code that you will ever look at is the code you wrote six months ago. And that is every six months, you look back and you're like, Ah, I've learned more about what I did back then, that makes me want to do this a different way or makes you want to do it a better way. Because it there is a feedback loop in there. And if you see that, it doesn't mean you suck six months ago, it means you've learned and you've gotten better. So it's a very positive, very useful or valuable thing.

Eric Van Johnson
I think t

Panelists

Sara Golemon

Sara Golemon

  • Sara is @SaraMG@Mastodon.Technology
  • She works on getting XP in video games and torturing PHP
  • Works on the XHP extension for PHP - XHTML embedded in PHP

Ben Ramsey

Ben Ramsey


Joe Ferguson


Derek Pyatt

Third-year student at Boise State University pursuing an undergraduate degree in Games, Interactive Media, and Mobile (GIMM), also working as a Web and Digital Coordinator for BSU's Admissions office



Kenneth Marks

Author of "PHP Web Development with MySQL" and teaching IT programming at Madison Area Technical College for ten and a half years in the Web Software Developer degree program


Kaelyn Lang

Kaelyn Lang

Student at Madison Area Technical College studying Web Software Development BFA in Game Design and Development - Art and a minor in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Stout


Adam Giles

Third-year student at Boise State University pursuing an undergraduate degree in Games, Interactive Media, and Mobile (GIMM) / @adamgiles278


Eric Van Johnson

Passionate about the PHP Programming language. I am currently one of the team members behind PHP Architect. I also have a couple of podcast including this one, PHPRoundtable, along with PHPUgly and the PHP[podcast]