Ken Wheeler is a software engineer with well over a decade of experience. He shares stories about his journey into tech, his life, and his hobbies.

Ken fell in love with coding as a kid, building his skills from QBasic to PHP and HTML. He recounts his transition from being a rap producer for a decade to stumbling upon a job listing for a web developer using Flash. After twisting the truth to get through the interview, he spent five years building local restaurant websites with Flash animations. Ken dives into some unfiltered hot takes from TypeScript to CSS and the ongoing debate of sidebar placement in VS Code. He shares his love for inferred types over explicit types, arguing in favor of TypeScript's Hindley-Milner type system.

In this episode, Ken talks to Robbie and Chuck about his thoughts on types, Tailwind and VS Code, his coding journey from QBasic to HTML as a kid, and his technique for landing his first job.

Key Takeaways

[00:48] - Introduction to Ken Wheeler.
[01:56] - A whiskey review: Basil Hayden Straight Bourbon Whiskey.
[19:03] - Tech hot takes.
[40:57] - Ken discusses his New Jersey roots and how he entered the tech field.
[49:51] - Chuck, Robbie, and Ken talk about cars.
[59:00] - Chuck’s plans to move to Italy.
[01:04:41] - Chuck, Robbie, and Ken discuss burgers and sandwiches.

Quotes

[19:20] - “Typescript is good. It's better than Javascript.” ~ Ken Wheeler

[34:50] - “A senior at dickhead.com is not the same as a senior at Google.com.” ~ Ken Wheeler

[37:48] - “Webpack actually isn’t that hard, believe it or not, if you just dig into it.” ~ Ken Wheeler

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Hot Takes, Web Technologies, and Learning to Code with Ken Wheeler 01:16:37 Share

Whiskey Web and Whatnot: Web Development, Neat

Shownotes Transcript

Hot Takes, Web Technologies, and Learning to Code with Ken Wheeler