#005 – Programmer Nostalgia with Kevin Grossnicklaus

Kevin Grossnicklaus is an old school developer who lives in St. Louis, MO and runs a great team of 7 developers at his company ArchitectNow. At ArchitectNow, he and his team build apps targeting a variety of platforms ranging from web to desktop to mobile. When not building apps for customers, Kevin can be found traveling, chicken pickin’ on his Telecaster, or tracking his expanding amount of grey hair thanks to his three teenage daughters. He’s also still holding out for a second season of Firefly.

Kevin is also the co-author of Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2017.

In this episode, Derek Hatchard and Ron Smith join Kevin in reminiscing about early programming experiences on personal computers from the 80s and discuss why curiosity and a desire to learn are so important for software professionals. In November 2017, Kevin wrote the blog post “A Touch of Applesoft Basic” about his early programming experiences and introducing his 80s and 90s tech to younger software developers. Check it out for photos of the things Kevin talks about in this episode of Ardent Development.

Where to find Kevin Grossnicklaus

@kvgros on Twitter

On the web at http://architectnow.net/blog/

In print at Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2017

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

Follow @ardentdev

Transcript

Derek: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast. I’m Derek. And today Ron and I are on with Kevin Grossnicklaus. Did I say that right, Kevin?

Kevin: You did, it’s good enough.

Derek: Alright, good enough. Kevin is an old school developer who lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Say it the right way. And runs a great team of seven developers at his company ArchitectNow. At ArchitectNow they build apps targeting a variety of platforms ranging from web to desktop to mobile. When not building apps, Kevin can be found traveling, chicken pickin’ on his Telecaster or tracking his expanding amount of grey hairs thanks to his three teenage daughters. And he’s still holding out for a second season of Firefly. And I’m right there with you. Right there with you. For those of us who are in Canada which is where Ron and I, you might need to explain what chicken pickin’ is.

Kevin: Oh I’m a country guitar player. So American country music old school country music. I’m a Merle Haggard / Johnny Cash type guitar player. I’ve been doing it a long time.

Derek: Alright. So, Kevin, I saw the blog post that you wrote. It really resonated with me and you were going back looking at sort of how you got into programming stuff that you used to work on.

Derek: And I think it all sprung from building a bit of a museum in your new office. You want to give us a little bit of the backstory for that blog post.

Kevin: Sure. As you said it really it was thanks to the power of eBay. I was putting some technology in a new office we had built and buying some things that I had owned a few old, my original Nintendo and an original game cube and things like that that my wife wanted me to get out of the house. So I decided these would be a clever thing to put on the shelf at the office and talk about share with some of my younger developers. You know the things that I grew up playing or enjoyed back in the day and they’ll get a little more use than they are sitting boxes in the basement. In doing that it got me thinking about you know growing up back in the mid 80s when I when I