Hello CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,

It's September now, and I have a new episode out here.

​https://corecursive.com/prison-programming-with-rick-wolter/​

It's an interview with Rick Wolter, and it's an interview I won't forget.

In a lot of ways, Rick is a perfect guest for me. He is raw and transparent and not afraid to answer anything I ask.

( And it's about programming and prison, and prison is just innately an exciting topic.)

Also, despite being someone very different than myself, Rick can explain his life in prison, in youthful poverty, and in hunting for a job, in ways that make it feel real and alive.

Is it possible to understand a big topic like class struggle and the disadvantages some face, through the lens of software development?

Even asking it sounds pretentious.

But for me to understand somebody, it's helpful if they are similar to me in some ways. And a software developer leaving prison and learning to code is a foreign world to me. But it's a world close to mine, and that closeness lets me understand it.

So, spoiler alert, Rick was in prison for murder and became a software developer once he got out. Rick says prison was like a shitty summer camp and that he had some great times in there. I expect that will be controversial. It's not how we think about prison.

But of course, prison life is fine for some people because living in prison is a life. It has good parts, bad parts, ups and downs, and frustrations because any life does.

You should check out the episode and let me know what you think.

In other news, I have a couple of new articles up on the earthly blog, including one about 10x developers and why I'd prefer another term.

Also, if you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily has passed. I shared some of the backstory behind my relationship with him in this Patreon post (which is open to everyone).

Thanks,

Adam @adamgordonbell​