Guest: Sergio Ruiz, @Sergio_101
Release date: April 30, 2018
@macgenie: Hey it’s Micro Monday again, the weekly microcast where we get to know members of the Micro.blog community. I’m Jean MacDonald, the community manager here at Micro.blog. And today I am very pleased to welcome Sergio Ruiz, who is @sergio_101 at Micro.blog. Hey Sergio, welcome to Micro Monday. How are you doing?
@Sergio_101: Good, good thanks for having me. This is like the first time or the second time I think I’ve ever been interviewed. So it’s awesome.
@macgenie: I’m really looking forward to this. And before we get into our questions, I would love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself.
@Sergio_101: OK. Presently I live in the middle of the Midwest, a little town in Ohio that’s about an hour from Cleveland, an hour from Columbus, and an hour from Akron, which means that I get to see a lot of good concerts. It’s a good place to live, now that we have the advent of internet radio, my life is so much better. By day, I am a software developer for a company locally here. So I write code all day, and that also happens that my hobby is writing code. So I’ve been doing that for probably 25-30 years now. And so when I’m not doing that, I read too many books, I play too many chess games, I build electronic stuff and I work as a side gig as a music producer in a studio here in town. I never get to sleep.
@macgenie: Wow, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on to the podcast today, because that’s quite a full plate of activities for you. Well let’s start with our usual first question which is: how did you hear about Micro.blog?
@Sergio_101: I heard about it on one of the TWiT network podcasts, I think it was probably This Week In Tech or one of those Leo Laporte-hosted ones. He was talking about alternatives to Twitter and alternatives to Facebook. And at that point I was looking for both of those. So I immediately hopped on here and checked it out to see what was going on.
@macgenie: Well that’s really cool that the folks over at TWiT are interested in Micro.blog and I do think that their audience is a good audience for Micro.blog as well. Did did you have a blog before Micro.blog? I’m guessing the answer is yes.
@Sergio_101: I had a couple of blogs actually. I had a blog before blog software was available. It’s a long story. Back in the mid 90s, I was in a band and we were playing everywhere, all over the place. And I was doing photography for behind the scenes backstage, you know, all that kind of stuff and reporting on what was going on on the road through a magazine. It was a little paper flyer called The Village buzz and it was about our travels on the road with all of our favorite bands and stuff. So I ended up making a web site using one of the old PHP CMSs and I can’t even remember what it was called, but it ended up breaking all the time. It kept getting hacked because it was open source, getting hacked all the time. So I decided that that format was not really conducive to what we were doing, because everything had to be pigeonholed and there was a lot of layout issues. And there was nobody on the Internet yet, there was a couple of dorks, and I was one of them. At that time, I thought, “Wow, it really it doesn’t make sense to have to pigeonhole everything and make everybody work so hard to find what they’re interested in. It would make more sense to do like reverse chronological order and just put everything up to the front.” So I started looking around and there was nothing. So I ended up, and I know that I’ll get crucified for this, but I ended up writing a thing in ASP because that’s the only server that we had at that time, so I had to hurry up and learn ASP, and hurry up and figure out how to get a database set up but that was it. We ran that there a long time and people followed that for a long time.
@macgenie: That’s good. So what was the name of your band?
@Sergio_101: My band was called Adrenaline Rocket.
@macgenie: Good name! And what did you play?
@Sergio_101: I play the drums and we did indie rock post punk kind of thing. It was a lot of fun.
@macgenie: Yeah, music and making music like that and performing I know myself, I got into it relatively late in life through the Rock n Roll Camp for Girls here in Portland. They did a program for women. We formed a band at camp and then we played in a club at the end of the program. It was so fun and so a lot of the women, just like the girls who do the girls camp, got really hooked on that and I was also. I also had a band for a few years where we played around mostly in Portland but we did once play in Vancouver, British Columbia. That was cool.
@Sergio_101: Awesome!
@macgenie: So tell me about how you’re using your Micro.blog blog, whether more for social or do you have certain content you like to post right.
@Sergio_101: I’m kind of just feeling my way around. The thing that first I was kind of puzzled with Micro.blog was that you don’t have any idea who is following you. And if somebody likes something, you don’t know about it. And so the only way that you know that somebody has heard what you’re talking about is if they respond back, which now that I’m playing with it, it really makes much more sense. Because Twitter, which is along the same lines in that it’s short content, the problem I have is that it’s just so much chatter that you get back, if you post something you get tagged if somebody likes your thing, if somebody responds to it, all kinds of chatter.
So I found Micro.blog as a way to talk about whatever I’m thinking about and not being exposed to the chatter that happens afterward. So I’m posting and just looking around for people who are interested in same kind of things. One of my favorite computer programming languages is Smalltalk, and I find that there’s a lot of people that do it and people don’t generally talk about it too much, so I’m looking for people who are interested in that, interested in the same kind of things I am into: Internet radio, music, books, that kind of thing. I don’t want to say I’m apolitical, but that’s not really what floats my boat. It’s all the political chatter on Twitter and Facebook. So I look for more things that are fun and interesting.
@macgenie: Well that that’s cool. That’s what I like about Micro.blog, but it definitely has taken me a while to get in the mindset and I notice that I’m in the mindset when I go back to Twitter and I’m like “Oh my!” It’s not just the volume, because I’ve really pared down the number of people I really follow, and I also have disabled retweeting on almost everybody, which is really great. I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier. On the other hand nothing beats like Twitter right now for getting the word out about something new. And so that is one of the reasons I do stay on Twitter and follow the people I follow. Micro.blog will get there as well. I think we’ve gathered such a thoughtful group, I believe that the number of followers won’t be as important as the quality of the followers.
@Sergio_101: Right. And that’s what I like about it is that the quality is there, right now even thumbing through Discover, it’s a good way to see what’s going on, to see who’s out there.
@macgenie: Is there anything else about Micro.blog that you like, or anything you want to comment on about the platform? That would be a great way to wrap up this podcast.
@Sergio_101: Sure. One of the things I think is really interesting is that Manton is on there and posting all the time and answering things all the time. As as I’ve grown as a software developer, I’ve pretty much learned that language and framework don’t matter. Once you get to a certain point, then what becomes really important is being able to present an idea or an outlook into a set of data that makes sense and that gleans things that you wouldn’t otherwise see or that you wouldn’t otherwise intuit. It’s really interesting to watch the conversations that people are having with Manton and watching him process these things and take these things seriously. And you have all the people that are commenting are commenting serious things.So watching that that discussion take place and seeing things change in the application, that’s really super interesting.
@macgenie: I agree. Everything has evolved quite a bit since we first launched. It’s almost been a year since the platform opened up to Kickstarter backers and it’s hard for me to remember how rudimentary some of these things were that have evolved over time. I really appreciate you taking the time to come in today and talk with me on Micro Monday. Thanks so much, Sergio!
@Sergio_101: Thank you!
@macgenie: And to everybody else out there, thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you next Monday.
