#002 – Weird Things About Time with Andrew Burke

Andrew Burke has been a professional independent developer for over 20 years, working in everything from HyperCard and Lotus Notes to Ruby on Rails and iOS. Besides building software for various businesses, he teaches web development, speaks at conferences, and has several SaaS products and iOS apps on the side. In his spare time, he also does fan art mash-ups of iconic science fiction ships and characters with equally iconic Nova Scotian scenery – which are surprisingly popular in Halifax.

In this episode, Derek Hatchard and Ron Smith talk with Andrew about some weird things about time and what lessons software professionals can learn from history. From politicians and Popes debugging algorithms to century-long deployments of changes, it’s a radically different scale than a typical software project.

Where to find Andrew Burke

@ajlburke on Twitter

On the web at http://www.shindigital.com/

Andrew’s other projects include:

• http://www.beancountertech.com/
• http://www.remembary.com/
• http://www.starshipsstarthere.ca/

His “4 Weird Things About Time” talk from ConFoo Montreal is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM3LUB_MVa4

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

Follow @ardentdev

Transcript

Derek: Welcome to the Ardent Development I’m Derek Hatchard, here with Ron Smith. And today we are talking with Andrew Burke. Andrew has been a professional independent developer for over twenty years working in everything from HyperCard and Lotus Notes to Ruby and rouse and iOS. In addition to building software for various businesses he teaches web development, speaks at conferences and has several SaaS products and iOS apps on the side. And in his spare time, he also does fan art mashups of iconic science fiction ships and characters with iconic Nova Scotian scenery which is actually pretty cool. they are surprisingly popular. But they are fun. I think my favorite is the fisherman demanding the return of Firefly. So welcome Andrew. It’s good to have you on.

Andrew: Thanks. Good to be here.

Derek: Today we’re talking about weird things about time and this is something that you’ve been basically on the conference circuit. I guess it was 2015, you did that talk. An insanely popular talk a lot of people still tell me how much they enjoyed that talk. You have done it in Montreal, Vancouver and I don’t know where else. Talking about time has me thinking we are recording this in December which starts with the DEC which to me means 10 but December is the 12th month of the year. So what the heck is up with that?

Andrew: Yeah that’s the first weird thing about time I talk about in the talk. Anybody who’s a programmer knows that the closer you look at things like times and dates the weirder and weirder it gets. And I’ve had a lot of times in my career where I get really frustrated with time and date tracking and time zones and stuff. So I started really looking into things and got really kind of got obsessed about how all these you know calendars work and where are the names for things come from and how these systems fit together. And I found they kept reminding me of stuff in software and so the first thing I talk about is if you ever notice that the last four months of the year have the wrong name. So September has a 7 in the name but it’s actually the ninth month of October