Brian P. Hogan

Being pulled in a lot of directions at once means you don’t get to finish some things. I didn’t get my RPM Challenge stuff done, although I did produce one track.

You can listen to “The Letdown” here.

I’m actually pretty happy with this song. I did a lot of it on the iPhone while waiting for meetings, waiting for things to build, or as a distraction for those times when my brain was starting to get fried.

Let me hear your thoughts. And check out the rest of my music.

I’m working a lot these days.

I’m editing a couple of really cool books, I’m working very hard on getting one of my best-selling books updated with fresh content, and on top of that I’m teaching full-time. That doesn’t leave me much time to work on music.

So against my better judgement, I’m doing the 2013 RPM Challenge, where you have just 28 days to write and record an album of music. I participated in 2011 when I wrote and created 26 Days and it was very good for me to do that. I’m looking forward to digging in again. I’ve already spent a few hours putting together some tunes, and I’m hoping to do the same thing I did previously-spend a few weeks writing and composing, and about a week actually recording.

I’m doing something a little different this time. It’ll still be electronic music, but it won’t be quite the same style. Stay tuned.

I’m teaching an introduction to programming course and I asked my friends and fellow developers to send me short 30-second clips of why they love what they do. Then I edited them all together. Here’s the video!

Why I Love Programming – Stories From Developers from Brian Hogan on Vimeo.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this passion for showing people how to do things. When I was in fourth grade, my dad, a teacher for the blind and visually-impaired, taught me how to program on an old Apple IIe computer. Once I got the hang of it, I started teaching my friends how to do write little programs of their own in our short-lived computer club after school.

When I went to UW-Eau Claire, I got a job in the web development area. Io once again found myself helping students learn how to program. I graduated and got a permanent job there doing all sorts of application development, from ASP to PHP to Rails. And for over eleven years, I’ve been fortunate enough to hire, train, and work with some great people who became amazing software developers, not to mention great friends.

During that time, I’ve also written books and done on-site and remote training sessions.  I’ve helped authors shape their books as a book editor. I’ve even been asked to teach in the classroom at UW-Eau Claire a few times, where I’ve been able to share my love of software development with people just getting into the field.

I love writing code. There’s something pretty cool about solving problems with code, but to me it never quite compared to the feeling I get when I help someone else become a better programmer. And it seems that no matter what I do, I gravitate toward teaching. Now, whenever I am learning something new, I’m thinking “How would I teach this to someone else?”

This week, I accepted a teaching position at Chippewa Valley Technical College. I’ll be part of the IT Programmer/Analyst program, teaching people how to build better software. I’m extremely excited about the opportunity. The program they offer looks great and I’m looking forward to helping even more students become competent developers when I start this fall.

While I’ll be leaving my current day job, I’ll still be hacking on Ruby and JavaScript code, and I’ll still be writing books. But now I’ll get to put more energy into teaching, and I can’t wait to start.

Back in February, I released my latest book, tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development with help from the wonderful folks at the Pragmatic Bookshelf. If you don’t know what tmux is all about, watch this video: (more…)