#004 – Meet the Host with Derek Hatchard

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 inter