Grant Wu is a Software Engineer at Stripe on the Ruby Application Infrastructure team. He also hates scary movies, but still can’t stop himself from reading their IMDB synopses.

Charlie and Oz dig into Grant’s study habits for self-guided learning (like building a toy kernel and toy compiler) — and how those low-level projects influenced his path to Stripe. The gang gets into it over bootcamps, baking bread, and learning to play music — all with the broader theme of exploring what it means to be creative. To top it off, we learn that Oz has a joint degree in math(s) and the (Australian) law?!

Links and resources:

• Stripe
• Sorbet: Ruby Static Type Checker
• Stripe’s Increment Magazine
• The Dream Machine, Stripe Press
• IT by Stephen King
• teachyourselfcs.com
• Matt O’Ree (Charlie’s guitar teacher in 8th grade and winner of the 2006 Guitar Center King of The Blues)
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (second time that Oz recommended this book!)
• What happens when you use Excel for your genetics papers
• Hack Reactor
• SICP
• Grant Wu on GitHub
• Grant Wu on LinkedIn
• Charlie Harrington on Twitter
• Oz Nova on Twitter
• Charlie Harrington's website
• Oz Nova's website