#004 – Meet the Host with Derek Hatchard

Ardent Development Podcast

Derek Hatchard is an independent writer and software creator, although he took a seven-year hiatus from self-employment to work at Salesforce where he was a developer, software architect, people manager, and product owner. He is a husband and father based in New Brunswick, Canada.

Where to Find Derek Hatchard

@derekhat on Twitter

@derekhat on Medium

On the web at derekhat.com

Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter.

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Transcript

Ron: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast and today we’re going to be doing something a little different. Normally we would have a guest on the show and we would interview them and we thought that it would be interesting to our listeners to find out a little bit about the hosts. So if you caught the last episode Derek would have interviewed me and for this episode I’m going to be interviewing Derek. It’ll be a brief interview. But just to give you a sense for who are these two guys that are this Ardent Development podcast. So welcome Derek.

Derek: Thanks Ron.

Ron: So let me kick this off by just asking how you got involved with tech.

Derek: Well OK! I’m going to reference an episode that we haven’t published yet. We’re talking to Kevin Grossnicklaus and we talked about programming nostalgia in that one. You were talking in that episode you talk about your Commodore 64 and I asked him about my Commodore VIC 20 and that is actually that’s where it started. I my parents gave me a commodore VIC 20 and I had a book with some basic code in it. I coded some stuff up and I didn’t I didn’t fully understand what I was doing. I didn’t appreciate the power of what I was doing. To me I was like I created a really lame video game. When I went to high school, we had old fashioned typewriters so you took typing on a mechanical keyboard. And then we had computer skills, which was you know basic computer put some floppy drives in the load DOS and learn a little bit of Lotus 1-2-3. When I took that class, I’d gotten through all of the curriculum and so the teacher said Well why don’t you try to learn how to write some code. And so I wrote a blackjack game in Pascal. And that’s how it started. That was the first thing that I really wrote where I was creating some parts of the algorithm that I was really trying to understand what was going on. Even that though didn’t totally seal the deal for me. When I when I was picking what I was going to do after high school and you meet with the guidance counselor. I was applying to schools and one of the schools I applied to you could pick up to three faculties that you wanted to apply to. So I had applied to math or physics like physics and engineering. She said well you might as well put a third one in. Since you there’s a spot there it doesn’t hurt because you might get you know you might get accepted into one or maybe you’ll get a better scholarship offer from one. You can always switch majors later once you get there. So I put computer science in and lo and behold of all of the various acceptance letters and scholarship offers that I got the best one was from the University of New Brunswick. UNB is actually based in Fredericton where I live now. Yeah I had the best scholarship office offer was for computer science as well. I don’t really know what path I want to be on so I’ll go do computer science. I had my moments of doubt when I was in there I ended up actually doing not only a computer science degree but I did a psychology degree in undergrad and currently because I was interested in some aspects of the human computer interaction. Some of the research that was going on at the intersection of those disciplines ended up working a couple of jobs. Technically, I think I only had three jobs in my career the rest of the time I’ve been I’ve been self-employed but I’ve had a couple of jobs went back to grad school. Had this really interesting experience where I went from the consulting world where you would work on things and you had this relatively short feedback cycle in terms of you know your client would accept the work and it would go into production. Or in one case I was actually on a design project. Not sure if it actually ever went into production. I think he may have only ever just designed it. But I found a really hard when I got to grad school. Although I had sort of always fancied myself as an academic. It turns out that I wasn’t excited about the idea of doing research that I published and then waited for a decade for it to make its way into the industry. I was actually really gung-ho to see my work show up in the hands of users as early as possible. Which led me to leave school and my wife was she had her first baby and she was on maternity leave. So here in Canada we had maternity leave policy so as she was home with the baby, I had left school, and we had moved. I said Well you know what I really want to do is I want to build software products so why don’t I start a company and I’ll bootstrap it with consulting work you know start picking up consulting work. And I had so much fun during that early phase, because I was not just writing code for people that I had picked up some work writing. Writing tutorials, wrote magazine articles, I wrote slides for presentations. So basically like making sure all of the technical information was correct and like keynote talks at product launches. Coauthored a book, edited a book that actually was released under a Creative Commons license which was which is pretty fun. So did a bunch of really interesting things and didn’t actually have this really have the traditional school go get a job and write code for 10 years. I almost immediately was into all kinds of different activities surrounding the development space I lots of code during that time but I also recorded videos and recorded audio and I did a lot of writing so it was really fun for me. It’s certainly not traditional by any stretch.

Ron: So I’m remembering back to when we met 15 years I don’t know how long ago it was. I think he told me that you were the regional director for Microsoft and I thought to myself “Who is this guy like he’s just young.” You don’t hear of people having that role. And I thought: Man is this guy ever keen that he’s tied in with Microsoft. I think it’s a volunteer position but you got you got to meet some great people from Microsoft and the like. But I was struck by how young you were you know already running a consulting company Regional Director for Microsoft. You had written a book. I was like man this guy’s all in. Anyway it’s a long time ago now but you seem to accomplish more in your youth. Coming out of university than most of the peers that I would have worked with. I remember sitting back and chatting with you. And you said early in your career you were very interested in all these different types of technology so you would study them all. You were one of the guys that enjoyed the debate. Well what piece of technology should we use in this aspect. So again that was different than what most people do because you know so me included. So I went to university and studied C and I worked in C and I worked in Oracle a lot. When I when I first graduated but you had this breadth across the spectrum which was really it was really neat to ...