Episode 24 : Sarah Mei (second interview)

Sarah’s Bio:
Sarah is a Ruby and JavaScript developer based in San Francisco, California. As the Chief Consultant at DevMynd Software, she spends most of her time pairing with her clients’ developers, helping level up their team. Her particular areas of interest are Object-Oriented Programming, service refactorings, growing teams, and inter-developer dynamics.
She has written about my experiences pair programming and also her approach to testing but her most popular article, by a huge margin, is about the dangers of shiny new technology.
Sarah is writing a book with Sandi Metz about how to refactor Rails applications towards happiness and she can be found on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Today we are going to talk to Sarah Mei once again. Sarah was here for an interview earlier. If you missed it, go ahead and check it out. This will be the 2nd part of the interview. Could you please describe yourself?
Sarah: I am a software developer. That’s how I see myself. Although, I believe it’s been a year or 2 since I’ve done full-time coding. These days I do roughly half time coding and the rest of the time I spend doing other things like writing, blogging, working on talks, or doing conference work. I’ve been doing programming since around 1996. So, this year will be my 20th anniversary.
Arsalan: We should celebrate. We should have you on the 20th-anniversary special.
Sarah: Yeah, that would be awesome. So, I’ve been a developer for most of that time. I made a couple of brief forays into management, but most of the time. I’ve done coding. In the last 10 years or so, I’ve also added a bunch of community work to what I do. These days I do a lot of work with conferences and I also do a lot of work with Rails Bridge, which I cofounded in 2009. That’s what I do and that’s who I see myself as. I’m always interested in hearing what how other people view me.
Arsalan: You’ve done so much work and so many things over the course of your career. It’s hard to describe you as a person who does a single thing. I see with someone who’s inspirational. You have opinions in your letting people know that. People need to know that this is how you can be someone who is successful and conscientious and social. For all of the new developers out there, Sarah is a good role model.
Arsalan: So, do you remember your 1st encounter with programming?
Sarah: I do. It was quite a while before I started programming. We had an Apple IIC computer with an old greenlight monitor. It came with the book of programs and basic that you could type in. There was no explanation. It was just look at the book and type that into the computer. I did one of them and it was vaguely interesting. But, there was no way to save the program. I would’ve had to type that whole thing in all over again. So, I was like “Really? Why am I doing this?” I try to type in another one, but I must have made a mistake somewhere because it didn’t work so I just gave up. I think I was around 10 or 11 at that point. That was the last time that I looked at programming until college.
Arsalan: Why did you pick it up in college?
Sarah: It was accidental. I went in as a structural engineering major. I thought I wanted to build bridges and things like that. I had a weird schedule because I was trying to take language classes and other things at the same time. So,

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