Today I’m speaking to Christopher Bailey, the host of The Real Python Podcast. We dig into his past in music and video production as well as his approach to producing online video content. Christopher also provides some helpful tips and tricks for any budding content creator looking to create their first coding video tutorials.
Ricky: Thanks for joining me, Christopher, and welcome to the other side of the interview desk. Let’s start the same way we do with all our guests: How’d you get into programming, and when did you start using Python?
Christopher: Thanks for having me. I started programming at a friend’s house, which had an Apple II. We were typing in the code from a magazine to create a text adventure. I can’t remember the specifics, but between sessions of Ultima we were trying our hands at BASIC.
My next big experience was saving all my paper route money to purchase a ColecoVision for myself. My parents then surprised me by buying the Adam computer that attached to it. It was basically an Apple II clone with a horrible daisy wheel printer and a “high speed” tape drive. I taught myself BASIC and made a couple of simple games as well as a Dungeons & Dragons character generator.
Fast-forward to college, and I studied electrical engineering at Arizona State. I learned some C and Fortran in a huge Unix lab. I dropped out in my second year and never got a degree. I was deep in the music scene, forming bands and learning everything I could about home recording and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface).
I’ve always had a knack for learning software and electronic hardware. It’s always just made sense. I turned that into a job at a musical instrument store, which led to me doing one-on-one consulting teaching people how to use their music hardware. That turned into touring as a technician for Wayman Tisdale. That then led to being a recording engineer in a studio in Sacramento, where I earned a Platinum record for working on Tyrese Gibson’s first album.
When I left California to move back to Arizona, a former colleague asked me if I wanted to teach at a school for recording engineers. I taught at the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences for ten years. I taught everything from MIDI to digital audio, surround sound, video game audio, Pro Tools, and Logic. After that, I moved to Hawaii, where my wife was born, and I worked for Apple as a trainer and then as a repair technician.
My wife is the person I need to thank for getting me back into programming. She worked for a bank, and they needed someone who could create SQL queries. I taught myself using as many resources as I could find: Lynda online training, Learn SQL the Hard Way, SQLZoo.net.
On my first day on the job, I was tasked with recreating a mortgage database tool based on a raw export of all the tables from the program. The tools I had were Microsoft SQL Server and Report Builder. I had no relationship diagrams, just raw data and examples of the types of forms to recreate. I learned a lot about mortgages and SQL very quickly!
Eventually, another job opened up at a different bank in Hawaii, but they were looking for someone who could use Python. I once again crammed as much as I could before the interview. That’s where I found Real Python and Dan’s book, Python Tricks. I had heard him on the Talk Python to Me podcast. I did a short coding test in person and another take-home one. I got the job and worked as a data analyst for their marketing department.
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/interview-christopher-bailey/ »
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