MRS 044: Sam Aaron

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Sam Aaron

This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Sam Aaron. Sam is a programmer who likes to try to get other programmers involved and programming in creative ways. Currently, he has been making music with programming with Sonic Pi and teaching children how to do so as well. He first really got into programming when he picked up a graphing calculator when he was in school and would program games and pictures on it. They talk about what led him to Ruby and what led him to create Sonic Pi.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

Episode 215 of Ruby Rogues
Sam intro
Sonic Pi
How did you fist get into programming?
Programming on graph calculators
Went to university to study programming
Self-taught
How did you get into Ruby?
Ph.D. in CS
Hated programming
Saw first DHH screencast on Rails
Liked that he could tinker with and get immediate results back with Ruby
How did you wind up doing something like Sonic Pi?
Monode
Played piano as a kid
Max Msp
Over a million users on Sonic Pi
What have you learned from creating Sonic Pi?
Concurrent programming
Interested in TDD
Clojure
Brought a lot from Clojure into the Ruby community
How do you make systems simple?
And much, much more!

Links:

Episode 215 of Ruby Rogues
Sonic Pi
Ruby
Rails
Clojure
Sam.Aaron.name
@samaaron
Sam’s Github
@Sonic_Pi

Picks:

Charles

Vail, Colorado

Sam

Sonic Pi
Synthesizers
Monodes
Walking in the Hills