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Thread: Hey Druff, tell me about your computer background

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    Hey Druff, tell me about your computer background

    You have talked about computer programming background previously, so I'dl like to interrogate you on this.

    Do you have a degree in this field, what languages did you learn in the beginning, who did you work for and what kind of projects did you work on? What as the pre-dominate RDBMS of the day?

    Do you program at all now as a hobby, or for profit?

    Have you done any custom programming on these forums? Is it all in php? When the forum software company releases an update, how do you make sure any custom changes you made aren't overwritten when you pull (or they push) the update?

    Can you also tell me about podcasting - who pays for the bandwidth and how come whatever connection is used when streaming live isn't overwhelmed? Is it because the audio doesn't use much bandwidth? It just seems like eventually the pipe would be saturated.

    What about archived podcasts? How does Stitcher (my preferred app) stream it to me? Who is hosting these long-ass podcasts and paying for the storage and bandwidth?

    How are the show descriptions pushed to the various podcast platforms? Is it some sort of XML/RSS type format or what exactly?

    How many people listen every week and how good are the stats? Do they tell you how long they listened, etc? I mean we have iTunes, stitcher and god only knows what other ways people listen - how can all this data be aggregated with any kind of certainty?

    Due to the unbelievable consistency in which the top podcasts produce content, I assume they are doing very well? Maron, Carolla, Rogan, Nerdiest, etc NEVER miss a beat. They (like you) are really good at showing up and while obviously you are passionate about it and have zero profit motives, these other guys have to do well, right?

    A guy like Rogan, who is very prolific, gets 250k + views on youtube and I have heard him say the majority of his audience is audio only. WTF? This means more people listen to him than most nightly news shows. I often see podcast ratings and he is usually top 10 or 20 but never #1. I call bullshit - I doubt the next 5 people put together could average 250k viewers per episode on youtube.

    I know you are friends with SrsSrsly, do you think it is odd he seems to always take his videos down, move them around and otherwise make it a PIA to find them all in one place? This seems like really odd behavior to me. Like a personality quirk or something.

    Thanks!!!

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    Owner Dan Druff's Avatar
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    Do you have a degree in this field, what languages did you learn in the beginning, who did you work for and what kind of projects did you work on? What as the pre-dominate RDBMS of the day?
    I do have an MS in Computer Science. I worked for a large defense contractor, and then a small private electronics company. However, I only worked in the industry for about 8 years, prior to quitting and playing poker. I don't know the stats of the most common RDBMS in the mid-late '90s, but I seemed to run into Oracle most often.


    Do you program at all now as a hobby, or for profit?
    Not much anymore. Most of my recent programming has been modifications and additions to this forum and radio show.



    Have you done any custom programming on these forums? Is it all in php? When the forum software company releases an update, how do you make sure any custom changes you made aren't overwritten when you pull (or they push) the update?
    I have made a lot of custom changes (yes, in php) to this software. Some are visible to the user, and some are behind the scenes. For this reason, I do not update the version of the vBulletin forum software anymore, as that would clobber all of my changes. I am happy enough with this version. I have manually applied the patches they've released to my custom-modded version.


    Can you also tell me about podcasting - who pays for the bandwidth and how come whatever connection is used when streaming live isn't overwhelmed? Is it because the audio doesn't use much bandwidth? It just seems like eventually the pipe would be saturated.
    I pay for the bandwidth, but it's not expensive for what I use. If the radio show blew up really huge, I'd have to come up with another solution. The server isn't overwhelmed because it's part of a big server farm, and because most of our listenership is archived, and not live.


    What about archived podcasts? How does Stitcher (my preferred app) stream it to me? Who is hosting these long-ass podcasts and paying for the storage and bandwidth?

    How are the show descriptions pushed to the various podcast platforms? Is it some sort of XML/RSS type format or what exactly?
    Stitcher and TuneIn download the episodes from the archives, and then stream them to you on their own. I pay for the storage and bandwidth to save these shows, but I don't pay at all for Stitcher or TuneIn (nor do they pay me).

    They are pushed via an RSS feed. A podcast RSS routine was built into vBulletin, but it was somewhat flawed and didn't fully meet my needs, so I modified it.


    How many people listen every week and how good are the stats? Do they tell you how long they listened, etc? I mean we have iTunes, stitcher and god only knows what other ways people listen - how can all this data be aggregated with any kind of certainty?
    My ratings are an estimate. There is no way for me to tell for sure, as there are a number of ways people can listen to where have no access to the data. It appears we have approximately 1000 total unique listeners per week, and that has held constant for a long time. We seem to pick up new listeners at about the same rate that we lose old ones.


    Due to the unbelievable consistency in which the top podcasts produce content, I assume they are doing very well? Maron, Carolla, Rogan, Nerdiest, etc NEVER miss a beat. They (like you) are really good at showing up and while obviously you are passionate about it and have zero profit motives, these other guys have to do well, right?

    A guy like Rogan, who is very prolific, gets 250k + views on youtube and I have heard him say the majority of his audience is audio only. WTF? This means more people listen to him than most nightly news shows. I often see podcast ratings and he is usually top 10 or 20 but never #1. I call bullshit - I doubt the next 5 people put together could average 250k viewers per episode on youtube.
    The guys you mentioned have lucrative sponsors, so they always make sure to show up. I'm not sure how much money they make, though. For me, I try to show up regularly just because I know 1000 people are counting on it.

    I don't know about podcast ratings rankings. Yes, there may be some fudged numbers.


    I know you are friends with SrsSrsly, do you think it is odd he seems to always take his videos down, move them around and otherwise make it a PIA to find them all in one place? This seems like really odd behavior to me. Like a personality quirk or something.
    SrslySirius is his own biggest critic, so he takes down his work that he later decides he's not proud of. Like you, I wish he would just leave it all up there.

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    Druff,

    Thanks for the response...

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    Druff,

    Would you ever consider going back into this field for work? Whats your opinion on these bootcamps for coding that have popped up and the earning potential in the future?

    I've made good money playing online poker the past 4 or 5 years but looking to do something else. If nothing happens in the way of legislation i think the writting is on the wall for earning potential in poker going forward. I have no cpu background but considered going to a bootcamp. I see similarities with poker that i like(logical thinking, problem solving etc, more working independent,). Just not sure if its worth it forgoing income now for the implied payoff of completing a bootcamp.
    Holler at me via Myspace

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    Pretty sure Druff does all his programming using edlin and his computing on a 6502 processor
    Quote Originally Posted by Jasep View Post
    I have always tried to carry myself with a high level of integrity in the poker community and I take it very personally when someone calls that in to question.

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    Quote Originally Posted by backdoorb View Post
    Druff,

    Would you ever consider going back into this field for work? Whats your opinion on these bootcamps for coding that have popped up and the earning potential in the future?

    I've made good money playing online poker the past 4 or 5 years but looking to do something else. If nothing happens in the way of legislation i think the writting is on the wall for earning potential in poker going forward. I have no cpu background but considered going to a bootcamp. I see similarities with poker that i like(logical thinking, problem solving etc, more working independent,). Just not sure if its worth it forgoing income now for the implied payoff of completing a bootcamp.
    Prove to yourself that you can do it. Head to this site and learn for free: https://www.professormesser.com/
    Quote Originally Posted by Jasep View Post
    I have always tried to carry myself with a high level of integrity in the poker community and I take it very personally when someone calls that in to question.

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    Owner Dan Druff's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deal View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by backdoorb View Post
    Druff,

    Would you ever consider going back into this field for work? Whats your opinion on these bootcamps for coding that have popped up and the earning potential in the future?

    I've made good money playing online poker the past 4 or 5 years but looking to do something else. If nothing happens in the way of legislation i think the writting is on the wall for earning potential in poker going forward. I have no cpu background but considered going to a bootcamp. I see similarities with poker that i like(logical thinking, problem solving etc, more working independent,). Just not sure if its worth it forgoing income now for the implied payoff of completing a bootcamp.
    Prove to yourself that you can do it. Head to this site and learn for free: https://www.professormesser.com/
    Is this spam?

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    Owner Dan Druff's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by backdoorb View Post
    Druff,

    Would you ever consider going back into this field for work? Whats your opinion on these bootcamps for coding that have popped up and the earning potential in the future?

    I've made good money playing online poker the past 4 or 5 years but looking to do something else. If nothing happens in the way of legislation i think the writting is on the wall for earning potential in poker going forward. I have no cpu background but considered going to a bootcamp. I see similarities with poker that i like(logical thinking, problem solving etc, more working independent,). Just not sure if its worth it forgoing income now for the implied payoff of completing a bootcamp.
    Even though Haseeb Qureshi claims he makes $250k/year after attending a bootcamp, am skeptical of them. I think there is enough competition out there for programming jobs to where most bootcamp graduates will be looked at with skepticism. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I would imagine.

    I am too old to want to bother with starting over with programming jobs. I told this to Ultimate Poker when they wanted to hire me to fix some of their bugs. I told them that it wasn't what I meant when I offered to work there. I wanted more of a managerial/decision-making position. So they weren't ready to offer that, and it went nowhere, which was fortunate for me given what ended up happening.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Deal View Post

    Prove to yourself that you can do it. Head to this site and learn for free: https://www.professormesser.com/
    Is this spam?
    You are just proving how out of touch you are.
    Quote Originally Posted by Jasep View Post
    I have always tried to carry myself with a high level of integrity in the poker community and I take it very personally when someone calls that in to question.

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