Hello, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology podcast. My name is Ken McGrath. I'm one of your regular hosts. I'd like to introduce to you Nate Schuda. Nate.

Thanks, Ken. Hi. I'm Nate Schueter. I'm a cloud solution architect, I guess, probably the best way to describe me. Although my general way of saying what I do is architect as a service. I go places, talk to people about architecture and all that kind of fun stuff. I do admit the first time someone called me that, I did sound the acronym out in my head and realized it may not have actually been intended as a positive

thing, right? It may not have been a compliment. So I do understand where that comes from.

It's great to have you. And being a little modest there, you also had a book that just came out

recently. Tell us about that briefly. I did. I did. So along with a good friend of mine, Dan Vega,

we wrote the fundamentals of software engineering.

This actually grew out of me sitting on the couch one day and thinking of all these little tidbits that you pick up as a software engineer over your career.

You know, like I remember I worked with this guy who had like a binder clip attached to his wall and you'd go ask him something and he'd kind of think about it and he'd grab his binder clip and flip and like ah here's the command right here and so you know you pick up all these things and so i started jotting them down in a note on my phone kind of thinking well maybe i'll get to like nine like maybe there's a listical talk here you you know, like nine tips on being a better software

engineer. You'll never guess what number seven is or something like that. And I very deliberately

stopped typing when I got to 42. And I realized, okay, there's a there there. And so I reached out

to my good friends at O'Reilly and started talking about it, started doing it as actually an online

training kind of a thing. We did a three software engineering fundamentals in three weeks and realized, okay, I've got like

15, 16 hours of material here and ran it and workshopped and they're like, yeah, let's turn

it into a book. And so, you know, the rest is mostly history. And yeah, finally came out here last

fall. So Dan and I've been out touring trying to get people

as interested as possible in it and, you know, having a lot of success with that.

Well, it's certainly an important time for fundamentals despite appearances.

And I must say, in a lighter note, those of us of a certain age are going to latch on to that

42 number quite a bit. Dan and Nate

have apparently found the answer to the life, the universe, and everything. Exactly. You know,

what's funny is we were talking a little bit earlier and like in my career, I used to write code

for a living, but I haven't in many years. Although I have produced more applications in the last several months than in

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