MRS 038: Trae Robrock

My Ruby Story

Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Trae Robrock

This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Trae Robrock. Trae founded and is currently the CTO of Green Bits which builds POS software for the legal cannabis industry. They have been in business for about 4 years now and are growing as the cannabis industry does. He first got into programming started when he was growing up and was always around computers. He started off writing clients for mIRC where he would write chat bots and code. He got into Ruby when he found that Twitter was written in Rails and noticed that he should probably learn about it so he could get a job after college. Now, he’s focusing on Green Bits and growing his team so that he can make it a successful business.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Trae intro
• How did you first get into programming?
• Grew up around computers
• mIRC Chat client
• How did you get into web development and Ruby?
• Web development was the only free version of programming available
• HTML and PHP
• Got into Ruby in college
• CakePHP
• Ruby on Rails
• Job at Outright
• CakePHP vs Rails
• What have you done with Ruby that you are proud of?
• Building DSLs
• Making code more accessible to people
• Automation in coding
• DSL use case
• What are you working on now
• Tries to get into the code
• What resources have you found that help you?
• Relationship management
• How do you learn how to hire the right people?
• A lot of trial and error
• Philosophy of hire quickly and fire quickly
• And much, much more!

Links:

• Ruby
• Green Bits
• mIRC
• PHP
• CakePHP
• Ruby on Rails
• Outright
• @TRobrock
• Trae’s YouTube Channel
• Trae’s Instagram

Picks:

Charles

• Hunting Hitler
• Podcast Blog
• React Dev Summit
• Ruby Dev Summit
• Have well-reasoned and calm conversations
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Trae

• Interactor Gem
• Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Trae’s YouTube Channel