Miles joined us to talk about his current job, his time as a counselor at SummerTech, and what it was like to build a culture at SummerTech, MA. We get an update on Ben’s odyssian PC, and Matt asks the world for a coffee sponsorship.
Podcast Transcript
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Miles Macchiaroli
Talking about summer tech you go “Oh the gnomes!”
Matthew Baptist
“Yeah, exactly!”
Matthew Baptist
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s edition of the summer tech podcast today we are joined by Ben, our wonderful tech director,
Ben Ehrlich
Hello!
Matthew Baptist
and Miles, who has been a senior web dev teacher at summer tech as well as a professional thanker.
Miles Macchiaroli
Thank you.
Matthew Baptist
Amongst his many roles here. How are you doing, Miles?
Miles Macchiaroli
I’m doing well, thank you. How are you doing?
Matthew Baptist
Doing really well thanks for joining us today. So, before we sort of dig into who you are and your experience with summer tech a little bit. Have either of you sort of seen any news about tech? I do this every week I set up this question the wrong way every week because the thing is I like say have you seen any tech news in the news and I flub it every week, and then Ben has to edit it.
Miles Macchiaroli
Have you seen any news relating to tech…
Matthew Baptist
Thank you, Miles.
Miles Macchiaroli
Recently?
Ben Ehrlich
I’ve got some personal news that’s newsworthy. So many moons ago I started trying to get a computer up and running. I had the tower from my friend’s old Dell XPS which was like cutting edge in 2009.
Miles Macchiaroli
Classic.
Ben Ehrlich
You know, DDR-2, you know, 480 graphics card. So I said, wouldn’t it be cool to use this case, and to build a PC so I could, you know, do video editing faster and play some games? I got my parents to bring me a motherboard from a computer I built, thinking it would have the CPU in it and they brought it, and it did not have the CPU in it. So, I bought a CPU online, that got delivered, but I couldn’t get it running at all. Turned out the board was totally dead. So I bought a board, and the board got here, and I can’t get the video to output from the board, and there is a sticky yellow substance on the bottom, so I’m not sure if it’s whatever that mysterious yellow substance that’s causing the problem, or if it’s something with the board, I messaged the guy, I got it from on eBay. He’s sending me a new board totally free. It could be that my RAM is bad I have two sticks of RAM that I found on the sidewalk one day. So that’s a little suspect. I walked to microcenter. It’s like a two-hour round trip. And I bought RAM, that was the wrong kind of RAM–I bought laptop RAM. So I got online, a piece of technology that converts laptop memory to desktop memory, it gets here, and the left side of it is smashed. So every single step of the way there’s been an obstacle.
Matthew Baptist
You know my experience with buying computer components or sort of doing any kind of maintenance like that has been generally everything working the first time. I think the only thing is that the payoff at the end is going to be all the better, right?
Ben Ehrlich
Well, I’m still using a board and CPU that’s from like 2014, and I am still using a graphics card from 2009. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the GTX 480, but it’s gets so hot when it’s running that it can cook an egg. It’s one of the least efficient graphics cards of all time.
Matthew Baptist
I’m really trying to, you know, I’m trying to…
Ben Ehrlich
Find the bright spot here?
Matthew Baptist
I’m trying to find the optimism, but it’s a little bit rough. Miles, what’s your worst horror story of building it yourself or bad components that you’ve run into?
Miles Macchiaroli
I have a lot of–I get a lot of junk from the trash can, like like servers on the side of the street my buddies and old bosses, just give me old servers so I have the most common issue that I always run into is, I’ll have a server I’m trying to install something on and it has a CD ROM drive so I put a CD in it, and it doesn’t work, and it’s been like four hours like trying USB keys trying CDs, trying DVDs and realize it’s just a CD ROM, not a DVD ROM drive. So I need to go out and buy CDs, which I actually did recently I went over to Microcenter and got CDs. It still didn’t work. Now I just have this hunk of metal sitting next to me and I can’t put anything on it.
Matthew Baptist
Oh no. Maybe you should, you know, have a stack of backup floppy drives I think that’s the–
Miles Macchiaroli
Well, I have those at my other location, but unfortunately, they are not with me today, but the most catastrophic thing I’ve done is accidentally crash an entire school’s network by installing GarageBand,
Ben Ehrlich
What? How did that do that?
Miles Macchiaroli
Well,, we rebuilt our music lab which uses Apple Mac minis–we got new ones. And you need to install GarageBand on all of them. So the update for GarageBand is about 30 gigs, and it turns out, Windows has a, like a pre-built bandwidth limiter. Mac will just take whatever it can get. So, if you try to download 30 gigs on seven Macs at the same time, the sysadmin comes sprinting down the hall busting down the door saying “Everything’s off!”
Matthew Baptist
Was this in high school or in college?
Miles Macchiaroli
This was in high school.
Matthew Baptist
Wow.
Miles Macchiaroli
So, the high school and then the neighboring middle and elementary school didn’t have internet for the duration of the installation.
Matthew Baptist
Oh wow.
Ben Ehrlich
That’s pretty amazing.
Miles Macchiaroli
But it installed in like 10 minutes.
Ben Ehrlich
That’s good internet anyway.
Miles Macchiaroli
Oh yeah.
Matthew Baptist
Awesome. So, again, thanks for joining us, Miles. So, would mind telling us a little bit about how you got started at Summer Tech?
Miles Macchiaroli
Yeah so um basically I’ve just kind of been into coding and programming basically all my life I. I like to tinker with stuff, and when I got to college, I met my friend Gabe, we were hanging out, and one day he said you know “you would–you should be a teacher at summer tech, you’d be a good fit.” I was very hesitant at first but he eventually talked me into it and then, yeah, I showed up one day and here we are,
Ben Ehrlich
What was the hesitation?
Miles Macchiaroli
I’ve never actually like taught summer tech in an actual-like setting. So I was kind of nervous about the someone sitting there looking at you asking you questions, sort of thing I guess the interrogation of it. I was nervous like I’d forget stuff or skip something or like screwed up somehow but once I actually like sat down and started teaching it all just kind of comes naturally. It’s a very, I guess, impromptu process of, each person is different, and you have to kind of just like work with them and you get to the common end goal at the end, but every time you sit down with a student it’s just a different experience.
Matthew Baptist
So you kind of have an atypical experience in a number of ways, with summer tech which I want to sort of dive into a little bit more because you came already as a college student, not having attended the camp yourself. So I think the first way I want to go with that is, when did you first learn how to program?
Miles Macchiaroli
First learning to program I guess from a very young age. I’ve always been fascinated by technology and electronics and I would always take stuff apart, and then I realized the stuff I take apart, you can actually program too. So I started with little switches and buttons and lights and then from there, I graduated to like Arduinos. And then from there to other languages like C, PHP, Java, and JavaScript. As I broadened my pool of tools and resources to tinker with I broadened my ability to utilize them.
Matthew Baptist
And how did you first learn how to program?
Miles Macchiaroli
I guess. It started when I attended a Lego League. I was part of the local robotics group, that’s like a very drag-and-drop basic interface, more or less, and then from there–I always start with like my end goal I know what I want it to do, and then from there, using the concepts that I’ve learned over the years, kind of, I work backward from the problem. So if I have a task I want it to do say I want like a display board okay I have the board. I have the picture I want, but how do I get it on the board? Okay, how can I automate that, okay, how can I schedule that and just kind of work backward from where I want to be?
Matthew Baptist
And so with that, did you find the way you would learn how to do those parts was just researching online?
Miles Macchiaroli
It’s a mix of both. So I started out with, like, online tutorials, so they have a lot of really good resources for example with Python, you can go online, and it breaks it down for you okay this is how we interface with the program. This is how we get our output from the program and then it gives you a series of problems. And it teaches you the concepts step by step. And then from there, you can find really good YouTube series on anything you want. I think my first YouTube series of programming was actually bash for Windows command line.
Matthew Baptist
Would you recommend that as a good place to start a learning program?
Miles Macchiaroli
Absolutely not.
Matthew Baptist
Okay.
Miles Macchiaroli
Terrible, terrible language, you can’t do anything in it except make text flash on the screen and open Internet Explorer windows. I was able to make a snake in it. Terrible, terrible version of a snake.
Ben Ehrlich
Impressive, that you were able to do that in bash!
Miles Macchiaroli
I can send you a copy later if you like, but…
Ben Ehrlich
We’ll post that in the podcast notes.
Miles Macchiaroli
Yes, but if I were to start out, I would recommend just Python. It’s a very forgiving language. If you’re not too fixated on the structure like semi-colons and brackets and indentations. I would, if I were to start again, I’d start with Python,
Matthew Baptist
And then, so what was your experience because you spent quite a bit of time learning on your own and then you eventually went to school where you would learn more of this stuff there. Did you appreciate the more structured environment after trying to learn some of that on your own or you was learning on your own preferable?
Miles Macchiaroli
I want to say I appreciated having the instructor there to be able to answer questions, and, like, for, like–you get a lot of like edge cases that are very specific to the program you’re making and it might not be like the catch-all solution you find on StackOverflow, I guess, doing it on your own is a fun challenge and everything but it, it’s a lot harder if you don’t have like someone you can ask questions to.
Matthew Baptist
Do you do a lot of programming in your day-to-day work now, or is it more so–do you actually want to tell the audience, just a little bit about what it is you’re actually majoring in and doing?
Miles Macchiaroli
So, I am currently enrolled at Wentworth Institute of Technology I studied computer networking. And in my time here I’ve been on two co-ops so far. I’m actually on my second one right now. My first Co-Op was at Harvard Medical School, where I worked in the Research Computing Division. I basically built and maintained tools and services that aid, researchers’ needs. I actually probably spent more time programming there than at my current job. I actually had to learn MATLAB and build a pipeline to take a big data dump of rat brain data reform it and put it into AWS for storage and querying,
Matthew Baptist
You know, for a second, just given what we’ve been talking about I was like, “never heard of that language before,” right? And then I was like, nope. So, what sort of skills or tools do you find you need most often in day to day work that you’ve been doing at these two co-ops?
Miles Macchiaroli
Honestly just being able to have an open mind and being able to go and find a solution to your problem being willing to, like, dig, I guess is the term I want to use. Because every step of the way you run into another roadblock and you have to resolve that before you can resolve your next step to resolve the initial step. And it’s just a rabbit hole of problems so being able to problem solve, is everything.
Matthew Baptist
I just now want to backtrack and get back to the summer tech experience in the summer tech part now that we have a much better picture of your background and sort of experience with programming. What surprised you when you first came to summer tech?
Miles Macchiaroli
The thing that surprised me was probably just, that I didn’t grow up with summer tech, we didn’t have computer camps or anything so the structure of it really surprised me. I was also kind of annoyed that I never heard of it before and I didn’t get to go as a kid because that was like the bread and butter of my childhood just like tinkering and playing with things and to be able to do that and have friends that are also interested in doing that too, all one place. And having game time to play games…
Matthew Baptist
Any particular favorite summer tech memories that you have?
Miles Macchiaroli
I guess just sitting down and planning things with the staff is a fun thing. Like the every time like we go to discuss like camper of the week that’s just always a hoot, as Jenny would put it.
Matthew Baptist
Jenny is a fellow senior counselor.
Miles Macchiaroli
Yes, it’s getting the, just like an absurd amount of candy at 10 pm from The More Store and staying up to like 2 am fighting over nominations and just planning, fun things that we think the students would enjoy.
Ben Ehrlich
I hope trips to Cumberland farms mix that list as well.
Miles Macchiaroli
Oh yes, Cumberland farms trips and oil changes.
Matthew Baptist
So, you were actually part of our very first crew to take on summer tech in Boston.
Miles Macchiaroli
Yes!
Matthew Baptist
What was it like bringing that summer tech experience to a new place?
Miles Macchiaroli
It was different because there’s a lot of culture that is built on layers and layers and layers of just years of inside jokes like the slab, or like, gnomes where like, you come to a new audience and the passive like remarks, just don’t do the same justice they do a SUNY Purchase.
Matthew Baptist
I mean, I’m already kind of appreciating the fact that, you know, the effect that those references would have on our Boston audience is exactly the effect it’s most likely having on our podcast audience.
Miles Macchiaroli
You have no idea what I’m talking about, but if you’ve been to summer tech you go, “Oh the gnomes!!”
Matthew Baptist
Yeah, exactly. You know, I think there’s a tension between sort of trying to transplant some of the culture and what made it special, while also giving room for organic, sort of, you know, all that inside community jokes and culture and all that stuff to form based on the group of people that are actually there you don’t want to force it to be a clone of some, you know, other program that’s not.
Ben Ehrlich
“Hey, you guys… gnomes!”
Miles Macchiaroli
Yes, everyone just stops in the lab and laughs. Like, that doesn’t fly in Boston.
Matthew Baptist
No, not. All right, any sort of any sort of like final thoughts about summer tech or anything that I should have asked you and, but didn’t?
Miles Macchiaroli
Not that I can think of overall it’s just like a really great experience, both from, like, a teaching perspective and from like a student perspective like being able to join the crew and, like, learning alongside all of you, it totally makes me wish that like I had something like this growing up, and the thing that I think would have pushed me to go even further than I’ve gone already.
Matthew Baptist
Thank you so much today Miles for joining us and thank you for tuning in to this week’s edition of the summer tech podcast. Remember to follow our podcasts on whatever platform, you are listening to it on, and if you are interested in coding classes, you can always sign up, or learn more information at www.coditum.com.
Miles Macchiaroli
Thank you!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
