Episode 69 – Mauro Chojrin from Standup Comedy to Coding Success

Mauro’s Bio:
Mauro is a PHP trainer and consultant from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He’s been teaching programming since 1997. He has learned several different languages and technologies along the way and has been working as a professional web developer since 2003.
Mauro has worked for different-sized companies, acting as an architect, a technical leader, and a project manager among other roles. Today, his main activities aim to help PHP dev teams improve the quality of their deliverables through more streamlined processes.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Hi, everyone. Welcome, once again, to Mentoring Developers. Here we are with a very interesting guest today who was doing programming and had a nice job, but then he got fed up with it and decided to go into standup comedy. We want to know why it happened and what didn’t work. So, are we talking to a software developer or a standup comic? Welcome, Mauro, how are you?
Mauro: Hey, Arsalan. How are you?
Arsalan: I’m pretty good. Tell us a little bit about your foray into standup comedy.
Mauro: Well, the thing is, I was working full time for a large software company in Argentina. At the time, I had it with software. I had been a software developer since I was very young, and I had always liked the standup thing. One day, I picked up a flyer that read Come Study Standup Comedy with Us. I saw this is my chance. So, I went into it and did a couple of shows. I was considering ditching my computer completely. Then, I realize that it would be really hard for me to make a living out of standup comedy. So, I made peace with the computer side of my life and I must say that I do always enjoy programming and stuff. So, I put standup comedy aside and went back into development and computer-related tasks.
Arsalan: So, how long did you stay in the comedy world?
Mauro: Approximately a year and a half, maybe. The other thing that happened was that once I decided I wasn’t going to pursue it as a career, I still wanted to keep doing it because I really enjoyed the activity. Then, I got married and between all the preparations for the wedding and my two teachers that were fighting between each other… there wasn’t really much to go back into. It’s one of those things where you say to yourself, “I will pick it up later,” but that day never came.
Arsalan: Tell me honestly. How much of this was your wife’s idea to quit?
Mauro: I thought about quitting, for real. I never really wrote any…
Arsalan: You realize that there’s no money here. In software development, as boring or as repetitive as it can be, it’s still one of the best careers and you could make a pretty good living and software development. All of us have realized that. I went into artistic endeavors in my own life. At one point I had considered leaving software development because I thought I was good at other things. Then, I realize that software development is pretty cool. You can carve your niche. You can make a good living and you sometimes it’s just a give-and-take. So, it’s wonderful.
Mauro: Yeah, it’s about finding the niche to make it interesting for yourself. I usually consider myself a very creative person and I don’t like doing the same things all the time. Yet, I think it’s very possible within the software industry to have many different roles.
Arsalan: You can have different roles within the company. The company can change directions and start to do different things and you can get involved with that. Or, you can change companies. You can move around. You can move to different countries if you don’t have opportunities where you are. Okay, that’s pretty good. Take us back to when you were a kid and you said that you got into programming early. What was your first experience with programming and how did you know that there was a thing called programming?
Mauro: Okay, it came from my parents. They bought me a,

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