Robert Martin

Hi, I’m Mike with UGtastic. I’m here again at SCNA. I’m sitting down with the inimitable Uncle Bob Martin. As you might know that he’s written these books “Created the Solid Principles” and written “The Clean Coder” which was a very well-received book on understanding how to write and design software well. Now you’re doing a series of videos called “The Clean Coder”. “Clean Coders”. “Clean Coders”, excuse me. And you have your bracelet. You reach out to and try to teach in a variety of ways. You speak, you write, you blog. Yes. And you even tweet once or twice. Sometimes. So you’re trying to teach in these concepts in a broad spectrum and I know you’ve gone and spoken in user groups as well. So you hit a lot of media. I try to cover it, yeah. Yeah, so what is that like and what drove you to create “The Clean Coder”? Yeah, so what does that like and what is drove me to create “The Clean Coder”? Yeah, so what does that like and what is drove you to create “The Clean Coder”? Yeah, so what does that like and what is drove you to create “The Clean Coder”? Yeah, so what does that like and what is drove you to create “The Clean Coder”? Yeah, so what does that like and what is drove you to create “The Clean Coders”? Oh, well, what is it like? It keeps me busy. I fly all over the doggone place and give talks and yell at people and encourage them to be professional and talk about solid principles and techniques and so on. I love to be creative. It’s something that thrills me when I can make something from nothing. And so I make articles and I make books and I make software and I make videos now. I got into the videos because there was obviously this new way to communicate with people, right? The web gives us this way of doing videos. And the tools for creating videos have gotten so incredibly powerful that I thought one day, you know, I should just make a different kind of video, not the typical kind of screencast, but instead a scripted, produced, edited video. And so that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time. And I taught myself all the tools and I bought some cameras and I actually put the first two I did, I threw away. And then finally got into the zone and produced a video that I thought was really good. I encouraged my son to work with me to put together a website, cleancoders.com, and we put the videos up on that website and we’ve been selling like hotcakes, frankly. They’re doing very well. It’s just another creative outlet. Just another way for me to spread my message around the world. So it’s not just about wanting to, it’s not just the message, a lot of it is creative. You can have fun with it, you can do, because you do some campy things. I have a blast with it. Holy crap. You do little campy things. Yeah, I do. But it’s, one of the things though that I think is interesting about it and it’s what kind of drove me to create this eutastic as well, is that it takes what a lot of people only deliver through Twitter or written work, which can be dry and it really depends on the interpretation of the reader. Whereas when you do a video, and that’s one of the drivers for this whole series, is being able to see and hear and watch the body language, the emotions, the face language, the sound of the voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a very wide bandwidth communications medium. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to communicate ideas. And the more different ways you use to communicate ideas, the more the ideas get across. So screencast is fairly one-dimensional, a blog is pretty one-dimensional, but a video has just got millions of different ways that you can present cool ideas. Yeah, so you can, but you also get a better idea of that, of that person. Right, well there’s definitely personality involved. Of course, that’s been my intent all along, is to produce these videos that are dripping with personality. Yeah, well and that, you are well known for your speaking being very effervescent. Or animated or something. Animated. I have pitied camera operators that had to try to track you on stage as I tried to take pictures of you during one of my code camps. I have them completely insane. I have a series of pictures that were just blurs. That’s all they were. But, you know, another goal of this video series is to help people that are learning how to speak as well. So, we talked about that we’re focused on user groups and speakers. So people, I’ve had people like Corey Haynes, I interviewed him, and he said that he actually, and I forgot to say this during the pre-interview, but it just occurred to me, is that he said that he studied the way you present and the way you engage an audience. Is that something that has always been in your personality, or is that something that over- No, I was born with it. I was born with that, and I’m not exactly sure why. But from, you know, age five, I’ve never been afraid of audiences. I like to engage them. I do better with audiences than I do with individuals, which is probably one of my pathologies. But, yeah, it’s just something that I have this innate love of getting on stage and entertaining a big lot of people. When I interviewed Brian Louse, he was talking about when you get up, you only have a certain amount of time, and you have to figure out a way to get a message through to the people in the audience who might have been there for several hours, and they’re tired, and they’re kind of checking out a little bit, but waking them up, getting them, and maybe you get one or two points across that leads them to go off and do a little bit more research. Has that been kind of similar to what your method is? You want to introduce a person? There’s a few major points that you want to make, and you want to make it in a way that keeps everybody engaged and everyone watching and interested and absorbed. There’s a song, I can’t remember the artist right now, but one of the words in the song is up there on the stage, “every ounce of energy you try to give away.” It’s not Abba, no, no, no, it’s Bob Seger. I’ll do that in the after notes, I’ll find out. It’s a Seger song, and there’s a lot of accuracy in that. On stage, it’s all about energy, and you try to put as much energy out as you can to engage the audience and deliver the message that you’re trying to deliver. You alluded to about, it’s sometimes easier to talk to an audience than it is sometimes to talk to an individual. I’ll admit that one of the things that also drove me to do this is that I had trouble engaging people directly, but by creating a format, it was easier for me to approach somebody and say, “These are the things I want to talk about and learn more about.” But by not just doing it for myself, I’m able to show other people it becomes not so greedy. But it was initially, you’re not the first person to do it. It’s really important to describe that putting on a persona for an audience, sometimes as software developers, we tend to more turn to the inside of our head, and then we come to these conferences and speak and share, and we have to kind of put on a mask, so to speak. Yeah, I suppose there’s a mask or something there. It’s a safe format. I can get up on stage and I know exactly what to do, I know I can engage the crowd, they’re all there to listen to me, it’s a safe format. It’s a lot like being a bartender. A bartender is a very safe relationship to have with someone, because they’re going to love you. Especially if you fill their beer up to the very top, just make sure that beer is going to hand it, they’re going to love you. Same thing with being on stage, you just make sure you fill that vessel up. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me. You’re welcome. Appreciate it.