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Episode 0: Introduction
135 Plays1 year ago
In this episode we introduce the hosts and the podcast itself.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:18
Speaker
Welcome to the forward slash where we lean into the future of it. Today, our special guest is me and my beautiful co-host James Carmen. So for this episode zero, as we're codenaming it, we're going to talk a little bit about our own personal background, what it is we want to do with the show and why you should listen. So James, you want to start us off?
James Carmen's Career Journey
00:00:46
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
00:00:48
Speaker
Sure. My name is James Carmen. I am the CTO at a little company called Caliberty. We're a small consulting company, about 115 folks right now. We do a lot of custom software development, digital product engineering, if you will, right?
00:01:06
Speaker
My history, my background has primarily been in consulting. I went to school for computer science and mathematics. Once I graduated, I worked for a couple of different consulting companies. Software Architects was the first one out of college, and then I worked for a company, I kind of embarrassed to say, because it's one of those like fall from grace type companies. The name of the company was March 1st. It came out of Whitman Hart and US Web, CKS or something, but it's like a
00:01:35
Speaker
Textbook study of like how not to run a company because it went like just down in flames But anyway, it was a good company good good network. But after that I went independent for many many years. I was an independent consultant and Did that for I think it was 17 16 17 years and then joined up with a company called Cengage Cengage learning where I met Aaron my host and
00:02:03
Speaker
Uh, we worked there for many years and then I came to Cliberty about almost five years ago. And, uh, as the CTO, my job here at Cliberty, what I do is, uh, I'm in charge of making sure that everybody has all the skills and equipment and everything they need in order to do the job at hand and to make sure that our projects are running smoothly for our clients. How about you? What are you all
Aaron's Early Programming Interest
00:02:25
Speaker
about? Tell me who are you and what do you do? Well, I take the requirements from the customer.
00:02:32
Speaker
Give them to the developers. No, that's a, that's a different, that's a different part of my life, but I will get to that. That's a little foreshadowing. Um, so I started off programming when I was a wee child, um, like six or seven years old and I still have the book that I learned from. Um, and it was just typing in code and then we would sit and, and, uh, debug it as like a father, son, uh, exercise, you know, type of thing.
00:03:03
Speaker
And they were just like little games, but this was, this was back on like one of the original IBM, like desktop PCs. So it had two, five and a quarter floppy drives. No hard drive. You had two. Oh, it had to wait. Or does that one only have one? Oh, that may have only had one. It may have only had one. You're right. That one may may have only had one.
00:03:32
Speaker
The one I had at home that I got several years later had two, but still no hard drive. So yeah, learned on that, continued to program as a hobby all the way up through high school, mostly basic A type stuff, and then got to college, took my first official language, which was Fortran.
00:04:02
Speaker
ended up, uh, but I was, but I ended up going an engineering route. So I wanted to do automation. So like, basically I wanted to make robots is what I wanted to do. Um, and so when looking for a degree, the closest thing I could find was manufacturing systems engineering and, uh, Found a.
Aaron's Career Evolution
00:04:30
Speaker
an opportunity to work with an automation company and they were basically doing material handling and tool fixtures for car assembly lines and ended up getting into offline robot programming. So the weld robots would go in and weld up the body side of a vehicle.
00:04:53
Speaker
And I was on a simulator, programming the robot through each step and setting its, its joint angles and whatever. And then I'd offload it, uh, or export it and then go upload it to an actual robot in a testing circle that was fenced off. Cause if it goes wrong, there's real consequences and you'd watch the robot go through the motions. And I'm like, this is really cool. Um,
00:05:23
Speaker
I've kind of gotten to where I wanted to be, um, working with robots and doing that. And I'm like, I'm only 21 years old and I don't foresee that this is going to pay enough to pay the bills that are, you know, enough for what I want to do. And so I started thinking about other things and they had moved the R and D department of the company.
00:05:53
Speaker
Uh, into our location and, you know, I was talking to them about what they did, you know, as a, as kind of like a water cooler conversation and, um, you know, saying, Oh yeah, we develop like the tools that go into the CAD system so that we can do like special things. And I'm like.
00:06:16
Speaker
Oh yeah, I used to, I used to do a bunch of coding and blah, blah, blah. And he was like, why aren't you coding now? And I like, I don't know. Is that a job offer? And he's like, yeah, if you want it to be. So I transferred over it just so happened that the system that they were working in used Fortran as its language. So I kind of slipped right into that and ended up changing majors and all that. Cause I was still going to school at the time. Um, and changed the computer science.
00:06:47
Speaker
Well, because I was already in the workforce in going to school, I continued along that path. I ended up graduating with my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
00:07:02
Speaker
about 10 years later with nine years of experience, or nine years later, I guess, with nine years of experience in coding, which led me through a bunch of different things. I ended up moving to Texas and working for a bunch of companies in Texas. So I got to work in aerospace and capital finance. I worked at an ISP.
00:07:33
Speaker
and a company that worked with chip testers in the statistical analysis of the testing outcomes from them testing microchips. And that was right around the time that the whole PlayStation 3 issue happened where a bunch of their chips were bad. Turns out that the
00:07:59
Speaker
What had happened was one of the testers actually was smashing and destroying chips on top of a stuck chip and ended up causing havoc and our software was running on the machine next to it. And if our machine, if that had happened on that machine, we would have caught it and saved it millions. And then I ended up moving back to Michigan because that's where my family's from.
00:08:29
Speaker
and worked at a couple of different automotive companies and some side automotive stuff and then ended up at Cengage where James and I met. I ended up being there for 10 years and went back to an automotive company for about a year and a half. I was unhappy there and
00:08:56
Speaker
reached out to James and he's like, hey, you want a job? And I'm like, yeah, let's go. So I've been here now for, was that three years or two years? Three years, three years. And that's where I'm at.
Podcast Mission Discussion
00:09:19
Speaker
I've had, and I've actually, one of my feathers in my cap, I've actually worked in every,
00:09:27
Speaker
position on an Agile team, including product owner in some capacity. So everywhere from developer to QA to systems analyst to product owner. So all of those things.
00:09:46
Speaker
James and I were talking about what we wanted to do with this podcast and why you should listen. And we started off with, well, first of all, we feel like there's a lot of technical topics that aren't widely known. And we want to share that information with the world, basically, and trying to raise the bar collectively on the technologies in use,
00:10:15
Speaker
the proper way to use them and what they're used for in certain cases.
00:10:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, those, those hot takes, if you will, of the industry and it, you know, it's, it's great. You know, you and I have had many years of experience. Um, you know, you were talking about IBM computers. People don't know what a floppy drive is. Like we've had a lot of experience, but you know, there's, there's new stuff, right? We, we don't know about all of the new things and there's, there's new opinions about things that might, we might maybe seem a little stuck in our ways that could be maybe challenging to us. And I think it's good to talk about those kinds of topics. Maybe we could even.
00:10:53
Speaker
you know, learn something from, of course, right? You can always learn something new. So I think that's interesting. When I think about why, why is it interesting to, you know, I mean, this is kind of Caliberty's podcast, right? Why would anyone be interested in hearing from Caliberty? I think, you know, the one thing about consulting is
00:11:13
Speaker
you get that varied experience. We work with a lot of different clients in a lot of different industries. And we have people who have a lot of years. So you multiply all those things out and it becomes a pretty broad body of knowledge that we can share with folks and bring that experience to enrich others, if you will. Yeah. And we talk to real people.
00:11:40
Speaker
with real stories about real problems. It's not anything made up. It's not theoretical. It's like these are experiences that a lot of our consultants have had and how they use different technologies to solve those things in their experiences and maybe some of the best practices as well.
00:12:06
Speaker
Absolutely. And of course, I mean, we're funny, right? So I mean, we, we want to make sure that we're sharing only, only on days that end and why.
Humorous Lightning Round
00:12:17
Speaker
So one of the things that we like to do to keep things light and fun at the end of every episode is to have our guests, whoever they may be, go through a lightning round of questions where we ask some off the wall questions that have nothing to do with technology most of the time.
00:12:36
Speaker
just to get an idea of who they are. Well, we've decided that if we're doing this to everybody else, we should do this to ourselves as well. So we'll be doing a bit of a lightning round battle back and forth between James and I. James and me. James and me. We do grammar lessons here on the forward slash podcast as well.
00:13:05
Speaker
I'll start off our lightning round. So, James, cake or pie? Pie. What temperature do you like to set your thermostat at? Sixty-eight. Very nice. What is your favorite martial art? Well, I studied Shotokan, so I'd say that would have to be a Shotokan karate. How do you feel about cranberries? Love them.
00:13:36
Speaker
The juice, the actual cranberries, I even like the jelly can stuff. Okay. Yeah. Who doesn't? I mean, come on. Our dogs, people. Mine are. They even have a voice that I do for them. Yeah, absolutely. Dark chocolate or milk chocolate? Dark. On a scale of one to 10, how good are you at trivia?
00:14:02
Speaker
I had a tough time answering this question. I guess I would make it a one. I don't know. I think I do. I do. Okay. I'm about a solid seven point four two. All right. Have. Have you ever seen a kangaroo in person? Yes, not in the wild. It was in person.
00:14:29
Speaker
What describe what you like to do on weekends, but in a Valley girl voice, I'd like to go running. How's that? How'd I do? It's all right, but you could throw in like the spoon or something. I totally like to go running. OK. Yes, there you go. There we go. All right. Give me the credits of that one.
00:14:57
Speaker
From 1 to 10, how hot do you like your shower water? 7? Ah, that's a cop-out. I at least added decimals to mine. 7 is the easy answer. Well, 7.13589 to be specific.
00:15:15
Speaker
Nice. Is there a line over the nine? Is that a repeating? It's a non-repeating decimal. Okay. That is the exact number. Sorry. That would still be rational if it was repeating. So we hope to see you in future episodes of the forward slash where we lean into the future of it. Uh, thank you again to my beautiful co-host James Carmen and I am Aaron Chesney.
00:15:46
Speaker
Give us a listen.