Geeking Out with Adriana Villela The One Where We Geek Out on Geeking Out with Scott Hanselman
Jan 27, 2026
46:08
Key takeaways:
- Language models without context are meaningless.
- How Scott's son went on a smartphone detox by getting an Alcatel flip phone where he could swap SIM cards back and forth from his iPhone to his flip phone.
- Given enough experience with enough similar programming languages, you're able to transfer skills from one language to another, and even understand/write enough code in an unfamiliar language to be dangerous. 😜
- The line of dev and ops has been blurred.
- You should containerize an app once or twice so that you know what ops is doing. It makes you a true "full stack" developer, giving you an appreciation for various aspects of the SDLC, and it also gives you empathy for what folks in ops are doing. The same applies to testing.
- The amount of preparation for delivering a TED talk is a vastly different experience than preparing to deliver a talk at a conference.
- Most schools don't teach computer history and it's important to understand where the technology that we use comes from.
About our guest:
Scott Hanselman is a programmer, teacher, and speaker. He works out of his home office in Portland, Oregon for Microsoft as the Vice President of Developer Community. He works on .NET, Open Source, and the Azure Cloud Developer Experience. He blogs about technology, culture, gadgets, inclusion, code, the web, where we're going and where we've been. He's excited about community, social equity, media, entrepreneurship and above all, the open web.
He has a number of fun podcasts and a YouTube channel.
Find our guest on:
Find us on:
- All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout
- All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela
Links:
- Adriana's 2023 talk at Monitorama
- Scott's TED talk
- Darmok t-shirt
- Star Trek TNG Episode 102: Darmok
- Paul Winfield - Family Matters
- Windows 3.1
- Joystick
- Commodore64
- PS/2 port
- RS-232
- Hoodo Hersi - Canadian comedian referred to by Scott at 07:33
- Scott's viral TikTok on flip phones
- Alcatel flip phone
- Scott's open source artificial pancreas
- Hollow Knight (game)
- Hollow Knight: Silksong
- Bambu Lap 3D printers
- Logo (programming language)
- BASIC (programming language)
- TRS-80 (computer)
- VisualBasic (programming language)
- Turbo Vision
- Gorillas game (QBasic)
- Nibbles game (QBasic)
- Floppy disk
- How to Rock It Like a Ted Talk: The Insider's Guide to Prepare and Deliver Powerful Presentations by Cathy Armillas
- eXoDOS