mcville: Coda Hale Interview

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Coda Hale Interview

Jan 27, 08:13 PM by Marko

Coda Hale Interview

Interview with Coda Hale at codahale.com

Marko: Heya Coda!

Coda: Howdy!

For our reader’s could you tell something about yourself? (year old and other stuff)

Coda: I’m 25 years old and a web developer at Wesabe, which is a personal finance website. I live in Berkeley, CA.

How are you doing these days?

Coda: I’m awesome! It’s been a really fun past few weeks — for whatever reason, a lot of my friends have birthdays in January, so there have been a lot of birthday parties.

When did you first encounter a keyboard or computer?

Coda: Probably around 4th grade or so — the computer labs at school had Apple IIe computers with Number Munchers and Oregon Trail and such. Around that time my mother went back to school for her Master’s degree, so she got a Mac Classic II. (I’m still amazed by that computer — there are wristwatches these days with higher resolutions and more processing power.) I used that to log into BBSes and make silly animations with Hypercard and such. Then when I was starting high school, my father got a 66MHz 486DX and eventually I got into development for Windows and then finally web development. (These days I’m back on a Mac and much happier for it.)

What is your favorite art work /website!?

Coda: These days the vast majority of online content I read comes through RSS/Atom feeds, so I’m really behind in which sites are good-looking and which are boring. I used to pay a lot of attention to that — CSS galleries and such — but I’ve been working more on back-end stuff lately, so I tend to pay more attention to the interaction design and community of a site. In that category, I’m always impressed with Flickr and Facebook, since they put such obvious thought into interaction design. When it comes to community, I’m perpetually bewildered by the success of Myspace — it’s ugly and half-broken, but people love it because it extends their opportunities for human contact.

My favorite artist is definitely RenĂ© Magritte, for his combination of surreal imagery and amazingly precise technique.

When you launched codahale.com are you happy with the result of the site?

Coda: I launched it to start developing a professional reputation — in that regard, I’m really pleased with the way it’s turned out. It’s an excellent force-multiplier for being clever, and it’s been a great tool for meeting other professionals in the Bay Area, and for giving code back to the community. I don’t check my stats that often, but I’ll occasionally find my own site in the results for a Google search I’ve done.

In terms of infrastucture, my blog is on WordPress, of which I am deathly sick. If I ever get some free time, I’ll probably move it over to Mephisto, which is a blog engine written in Ruby on Rails. It’s got a much leaner UI, plus Ruby lends itself to third-party modification much more than PHP, so it’s easier to customize it.

In terms of looks, I’ve never really been enthused about the design. It’s not terrifically ugly, but I’ve got a few piles of sketches and so forth that I never got around to implementing and I wish I had. My favorite imaginary design used a lot of design cues from men’s fashion, actually, which was a little bizarre. I’m not at all a fashionable person, so it was strange to be tagging and collecting photos of models on walkways just so I could record the colors they used.

I’m also totally done with having the whole two-column articles-go-here-and-links-go-here format. It’s easy to pull off, but if I get around to re-doing the design I definitely will be pulling data from all over — Flickr, Twitter, Wesabe, del.icio.us, etc. — and trying to integrate them into a cohesive whole.

What do you do in your spare time (We realize that spare time, in this context)

Spare time? Um. Yeah, not much spare time. Ideally, I’d go for a bike ride. Realistically, I’ll go hang out with friends, or lie around with my partner and watch cartoons.

Do you have a favorite drink? How much of it do you drink?

That’d be whiskey, that would — I’m a big fan of Irish whiskey. My standard drink is Power’s, neat; it’s not mind-blowingly good, but it’s a decent whiskey, and I can afford to have a few. For special occasions, I think Middleton’s is best. I don’t drink that often — again, no spare time ;-) — but like I said, it’s been a pretty social couple of weeks.

Would you care to give us a brief overview of what a typical day is like for you ?

Coda: I’m in the middle of an experiment; I’ve been getting up at 7:30am every day, regardless of when I went to sleep. I’m hoping it’ll even out my sleeping cycles, which have been all over the map for most of my life.

So at 7:30am, my cell phone makes horrible noises and I spring out of bed and make it stop. I then usually work out a little bit, catch up on email and feeds, have some coffee, and get ready to go. Then I chuck everything into my bag and walk to work.

Our offices are in the back of a women’s clothing store in Berkeley, so I usually hang out at a nearby coffee shop until the store opens. Work is work — whiteboards, discussions, in-jokes, staring at walls. We’ve got a really awesome group at Wesabe. Around 1pm we go out to lunch, occasionally with a “guest speaker.” I’m at work until around 7pm, when I pack up and go home.

Once I get home, I usually futz around with some work idea, or just hang out and watch a movie or some TV.

I am always wondering how people such as yourself go about getting work? How do you do it?

Coda: Getting work is like getting a date — you can either work the crowd or be awesome and wait for people to come to you. I’m lazy as hell, so I tend to go for the latter. It works OK.

When I got out of university I had a lot of programming experience, but no Computer Science degree, and no professional reputation to speak of. So I started a blog, picked a niche technology to get into (Ruby On Rails) and started releasing code. I started to release code under the MIT license — just giving back to the community — and people started to pay attention.

Since then I’ve been doing some “professional networking” (read: getting drunk with other geeks) in the area, which has been a lot of fun.

So yeah — pick a venue, be awesome without demanding anything, and be happy when people are interested.

Who are some of your biggest influences?

Coda: Outside of my family, I think my first big influence was Neil Rubenking, who wrote Delphi For Dummies. That was the first programming book I ever read, and it totally hooked me.

Right now, I guess I want to be Reginald Braithwaite (weblog.raganwald.com) when I grow up.

Is your background in design? What was the progression into web development and design like?

Coda: My formal education is in Peace & Conflict Studies — I’m a trained mediator, with a degree in the study of nonviolent social movements. This doesn’t help much with the software development, but it does help me reign in my enthusiasm for software solutions to social problems.

I’ve been writing computer programs since I was 10 or so — Hypercard! — and the first time I got into web pages was when I wrote a program I wanted to release and decided to make a web page for it.

Towards the end of university, I started to get into web applications, which was totally new for me. I’d written client-side apps and done web pages, but the combination was really new. At the time, it was obvious that web apps weren’t just a passing fad, so I put some time into figuring it all out.

If you were not a programming what would you be?

Coda: Honestly? I’d want to be a sex columnist. Not entirely sure why, but I think I’d be great at it.

How do you like our site mcville.net?

Coda: It’s pretty cool — I have no idea who most of these people are, and that’s great. So many sites stick to a small little Bay Area/New York clique, and it’s awesome to see a site which goes farther than that.

If you could change something on mcville what would it be?

Coda: Lose the “beta” sticker. It’s the web; we’re expecting things to be constantly changing. The “beta” sticker is the 00s equivalent of the animated “under construction” GIFs of the 90s.

What kind of music do you fancy?

Coda: Currently listening to The Thermals. Currently excited about Tim Fite’s new album, which isn’t out until Feb 20.

What’s your favorite food?

Coda: I’ll eat anything but licorice. Seriously.

Berkeley is a great town for foodies — the number of awesome restaurants is absurdly high for a town this size, and when you include Oakland and San Francisco, it’s paradise. My favorite meals this week were fried chicken sandwiches at Bakesale Betty’s and sushi at Uzen.

Where do you get out on Saturday’s?

Coda: Any place with a decent selection of booze and a dark corner for conversation. No dancing.

some relaxing question to follow

Chinese or Thai (food)?

Coda: Ooo. A tough one.

Probably Chinese, since I can’t find a Thai restaurant in the Bay Area which doesn’t overuse coconut milk.

Coke or Pepsi?

Coda: Neither. I’m not a fan of soda; I’d much rather have coffee or tea.

HTML or CSS?

Coda: Content over style every time — HTML.

Do you watch television? If so, do you have a favorite show?

Coda: Currently working my way through the X-Files. A big fan of the usual: Daily Show, Colbert Report, Myth Busters, Adult Swim cartoons.

What OS do you use ?

Coda: Currently, Mac OS X. Very happy with it — I’ve been on this whole Applescript and Quicksilver kick lately.

I was using Ubuntu, which was great, but like every other Linux distro ever, had lots of rough edges.

Windows… man. I used Windows from 3.1 to XP, and I don’t miss a single thing about it.

What would we find in your favorites bookmarks-bar?

Coda: Mostly work-related stuff. Ruby/Rails API references, links to banks, etc. All of my daily reading is in my Google Reader account.

What inspires you? This doesn’t have to be design related.

Coda: Some nice locally-baked bread with butter and jam and some fresh coffee from a French press. Checkins which reduce the number of lines of code. Zen archers. Strong women. Elegant solutions to common problems.

Thank you for having this interview mate!

Coda: Not a problem! Thanks for having me!

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Coda Hale Interview

Jan 27, 08:13 PM by Marko