Chat with Russ Olsen

Personally, it was a long ago since I had the pleasure to met the author of a book in person and I have never met the writer of any technical book. After this conversation with Russ Olsen, I must say that I'm very fortunate to be one of the persons who have had the chance to share the same, although digital, space as this programmer and for having Russ as the first of its kind. 

Although we only shared with him an hour of the class, he had the chance to talked us about a bunch of things, technical and personal alike. I would love to summarize every one of them since I personally think that every word that was shared has a unique value. Nonetheless, as one of the focal pintos that he mentioned, simplicity is key and in order to keep it within this post, I will only highlight those aspects that I found more interesting in three sections:

1. About his life: Hobbies are everything and, as he hinted, they somehow help us to achieve better opportunities as well as to prepare us for new challenges. As a personal comment, I can infer that it is really us who determine how much we use and expand our professional potential and not only the context in which we are being present. 

2. About his work (personal perspective about functional programming): As he mentioned, functional programming is not the future, but the present in many industries. I really connected with his personal belief that Functional Programming is a complex but more interesting approach of programming that, although the syntax in many functional languages is complex, helps us developers to maintain and create code simple. 

3. About more intimate experiences: There's a lot of people who have written books but there are more who had wished to do so. Technical writing is not as difficult as literature but it must be done wit a lot of passion and persistence. 

After what I mentioned, I would just like to thank my professor Ariel to make the effort of contacting him and make possible this experience. In addition, I would like to end this entry with a personal extrapolation of one the phrases Russ mentioned us. Sometimes, not only as professional but as human beings, we tend to forget that our work has the potential to change the way people think as well as the way the things are being done. We shall never forget that our effort is not only for ourselves but also for our community.

The book is about the person reading the book [, not about the content itself]. Russ Olsen.