Programming Throwdown, Episode 133, solving for the market price problem with Andrew Yates. Take it away, Patrick.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another exciting interview. Today we have Andrew Yates from

promoted AI, co-founder and CEO there. So welcome to the show, Andrew. Hi, thanks for having me.

So we have a lot of interesting things. We were doing our, I guess, our pre-shows inside baseball. We talked to Andrew for a few minutes before we start. And, you know, I think there's a number of topics we've never really talked about before. So I'm excited to dig in. But first, we always ask people, how did you kind of get into programming? What is like your first programming experience? We can start there.

Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a great question. When I was in high school, there was a program where Apple computer provided a bunch of free laptops for students. And I just loved it. And I remember it was like this silly, true basic little developer environment.

And I remember I was like, wow, I can make my own games. I'm like, yeah. So I made like all of

these rocket game. And I remember coding the theme for Zelda using like, you have to use like

the actual integers for the tones. So it's like trying to figure out the spacing of it. And I don't know. I just really got into it. And then it was getting into web design. So this was for me, it was back in high school. And it's just the joy of, oh my gosh, I could control this computer. And I ended up buying my own computer. Yeah, actually for me, I, geez, I remember I worked at McDonald's or like $5 an hour

and saved up for like $1,500 on my own computer so I could do it. I guess I played some games on

it too, but it was the joy of just being able to not only build things and see it work, but also

for me, I love the entrepreneurial aspect of it.

I started my own web design agency, you know, and I was in high school and that kind of stuff.

I ended up skipping school and joined a e-commerce company.

I lived in the Midwest.

It wasn't a very successful e-commerce company, but like, I'm sorry if we processed your credit

card because I wrote

that code, you know, like, but it was awesome. Like I actually, they did just like take my test at school and then like kind of skip out. And it was an interesting time. But anyways, that, that's how I got started. Oh, very good. So do you still have all those old programs or are they lost the bit rot. Oh, absolutely not. No, of course not. And they're not good either. It was just, I don't know, the joy of seeing writing something and then watching it run was pretty exciting. Yeah, I came across an old game I wrote in college for a class and played it for a few minutes and it's like, wow, this is really bad. That was before a lot of the, I'll date myself a bit,

I guess. I was before a lot of the sort of frameworks and stuff that make writing games a little

bit easier today. So that'll be my excuse. So then did you end up going to college for programming

or did you end up going straight into kind of working? Oh, no. I went to school for computer

science and then I ultimately did master's and I did a PhD and I was

going to do bioinformatics. I wanted to work on curing cancer and I was really interested in

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