MRS 044: Sam Aaron

My Ruby Story

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