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YES! It’s a Bowdark podcast, hosted by two of the very brightest and best people ever to touch a keyboard in the history of this or all other possible universes!

Episode Notes

It’s intro time — we focused on a brief bio of ourselves and what we want to do with this podcast in subsequent episodes.

James Wood

• Super-nerd in SAP and Microsoft technologies for 20+ years!
• Computer science undergrad, Master’s degree in software engineering
• Started Bowdark in 2006
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Paul Modderman

• SAP, cloud, ML, and other various nerdings!
• Monkeyed around in college and took 6 years to graduate
• Started career in PC fix-it work, moved into application development after a few years
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

James and I are both authors of multiple books, check out the company media page to find out more.

What The Heck Do We Want To Do?

• Level up ourselves and our listeners with our natural curiosity and amazing guests
• Be true to our authentic nerd selves, but don’t just publish zeroes and ones
• Get our creative energy out into the universe, and connect with fascinating people

Paul says:

I want to do the things that help our guests, and us, and our listeners learn at a different level.

James says:

I want this to be an environment where we can be naturally curious, and have meaningful conversations.

Maybe Just Read the Transcript

Paul Modderman: Hey everyone, welcome to the inaugural episode of Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood. I am Paul Modderman and with me is James Wood say hi James.

James Wood: All hello

PM: This is super exciting. This is just like all your favorite podcasts in the world. This is our sort of announcing ourselves to the world kind of thing. And so what I thought we could do is do some intros of ourselves and then do kind of a two-person round-robin of what we would love to do with the podcast. So let me kick the pod ball over to you. Don’t be afraid to take your time with it. Give us a nice, meaty intro, like who is-, who really is James Wood.

JW: Details of my life are quite consequential. So I’ve been working in the enterprise software space, gosh, now for literally 20 years, I start to see the gray hairs. I’ve been working a lot around SAP and Microsoft based technologies throughout the duration of my career. And what’s, really my passion is enterprise software and business solutions. And so, this podcast, I think, it’s very exciting for me to have an opportunity to kind of nerd out in that space, but not strictly from a ones and zeros code perspective, but really relate. There’s so many exciting technologies out there for businesses and how do those technologies and what does that unlock for you as a business? It gets heavy handed, but they transform the way that you do business, in ways that probably at times feel a little bit science fiction-y.

PM: I hope it does because I love sci-fi.

JW: But more science fact these days. And so that’s really my goal with this is to let’s figure out a way to, to bring these, these discussions to air and, and really break it down in ways that are hopefully entertaining for the listener.

PM: So take us on a journey though, take us from like college to now in terms of kind of where you’ve wound through professionally.

JW: Yeah. So I was a computer science undergrad, and always been kind of on that neuro track, I suppose. Started my first job out of college was with PriceWaterhouse Coopers, a hot minute before Enron happened, that consulting was spun off. And so I spent some time at IBM and actually worked for SAP for a time. And then my wife, Andrea and I, we started Bowdark back in 2006 and have been kind of in that space ever since, somewhere along the way we- I got my masters of software engineering and picked up four kids and some gray hairs and various pets.

PM: Pets like dogs and pigs and such, right?

JW: Yeah. Pigs probably being the most odd ball of the mix, but we’re a Motley Crew.

PM: That’s good. And so Bowdark-, and this is something I knew, but I think the world should know, Bowdark has been around since 2006. That’s a really cool, like there’s history there and there’s, internal progression of what Bowdark is and what Bowdark sort of focuses on and becomes over the years too.

JW: Yeah, we’re pretty excited. We’re one year away from being able to drive and it’s- you blamed, I mean, it happens really fast. It’s been a wild ride and last 15 years, and so much has changed. I mean, think about the early days, I’m sure it’s the same for you when you got started. Maybe not mainframes, but those kinds of things.

PM: So this is- so okay before I do my side, I do want to ask you one other thing, I think I maybe have asked you this before, but I forgot what you said. And so now the whole world gets to hear it and, and future like alien civilizations who uncover the hard drives that hold these podcasts, what is the name Bowdark all about? And how did you choose it?

JW: So, it’s not as fun of a story as you think-

PM: Is it kind of tragedy deal, right? It’s not like terrible. Okay.

JW: Yeah. With the last name Wood it’s like, well, what do we name the company? So Wood Consulting is generic, and so ton of bodark trees around my house growing up. And so that was kind of a quirky play on words there that other place. And the funny thing is all these many years later, nobody knows how to pronounce it. Is it Bowdark is it?

PM: That’s funny. So I didn’t even realize it was a tree. Okay. So it’s a hence by the way, the tree and the icon thing there.

JW: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:05:26] Plus light bulb.

Paul Modderman: Yeah. Okay. So that’s good to know. And thank you because I should have asked you that before, because I mean, who knows? It could have been some like crazy reason that I’ve been like, oh my God, why should I join this company? That’s crazy, but it’s fine.

JW: The better story there is entirely logic.

PM: We can- but maybe as we go on the podcast, we can like progressively invent a better story for why it is that way. My story here is I started college in 99. I’m monkeyed around with like a bunch of different things in college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. It took me six years to graduate because like I said, I didn’t know what I wanted to do by the time I graduated. I just, I had a degree that had a mix of psychology and theater in it. So really no in college, I didn’t, I kind of worked for a couple of tech things in college at the college, but I really wasn’t quite there yet tech wise, but because I had worked in, the laptop fix-it shop in college, the first job I got out of college was as a contractor doing that same thing for Cargill.

PM: And so I got my foot in the door at Cargill doing like PC fix-it stuff there, eventually Cargill decided to outsource that. So all of its employees that were doing that were essentially let go, but props to Cargill, because in that process, they said, Hey, we’re outsourcing your function, but we’ll give you sort of a bump in all of our internal postings for various things if you’ve always wanted to do something else. And what I had been doing is I had been sort of on the sly learning databases and learning like just VB scripting and stuff. And I had just been sort of managing some various data things for the client team with those tools. And so there was a senior .NET developer job, which I was nowhere near qualified for, of course, but they let me come in as like junior .NET developer in that role.

PM: So I was in the financial services part of Cargill or the financial reporting part of Cargill. I learned how to do like web apps, classic ASP, a little bit ASP.NET, some C-# like server services, things, just tons of that kind of side of the universe. Then about 2010, I joined the Cargill SAP team cause Cargill was implementing SAP. And so it was like being thrown to the wolves because Cargill decided to take its internal employees and just match them up with a raft of Accenture folks who were just doing-, who were actually doing the work basically.

PM: And there, I remember when I started, when I started, there was about three months where I did nothing for my work. Not because I didn’t want to, but because the management and the process there was so screwy that I kept saying, “Hey, knock, knock, knock, what can I do?” And just like, I couldn’t get anything to materialize as far as assignments to me to work on things finally got over that hill started to actually see things. And that Cargill was a great place to do that because Cargill had like a million different things going on in terms of what they were up to in SAP. So I got the chance to poke a lot of things.

PM: As I kind of got going there a few years later, I left Cargill, I went to Canadian Pacific on their app team. That was a great experience too, I was there for about a year. I got to go to Calgary a few times. Calgary is a great town, had a lot of fun there, a lot of good people I met there. And then after about a year of that, I joined Mindset Consulting and I was with Mindset for seven years or so from about 2014 until just a couple months ago, Mindset of course was like the, sort of the, the piece that really kind of leveled me up again, because I went from sort of doing what sort of the company wanted to doing what 10 companies wanted.

PM: Right. In terms of just seeing a various number of things. By the time I got in there, I started doing a lot of things. I started blogging a lot. I wrote a few books, which I know you did too. And I just got the chance to just poke a lot of things. It was so great. I’m grateful for my time there. Of course, it was awesome. And I’m also of course, just pumped to be like a boat or a canal, like doing Bowdark stuff.

PM: What I want to do with the podcast is so just take everything you said and say yes, and I just I want to have energy in the universe. I want to have-, I want to make it so that it’s not a boring promo marketing BS kind of thing. I want to ask people real questions and, and I don’t want to get our guests to be like, “I never thought about that, but yeah, I don’t really like, blah” I want to do the things that help our guests and also our listeners learn at a little bit different level than most of the surface-y, fluffy podcasts.

PM: And, and just like you, I don’t want it to be all zeros and ones. I want it to be, why are you doing this? You know, or why aren’t you doing this or that, or whatever. I just want to crack things open and, just be open about it.

JW: Yeah. I think that’s huge. You know, I think about the way that I consume podcasts, and it’s, I’m out gardening out of a brown thumb and I like to play in the garden and digging, and I have podcasts on it. And I’m naturally curious about things and to be in an environment where we can be naturally curious and not beat you over the head with sales and have these meaningful conversations. And the guest I’m really excited about the different perspectives. There’s only so much energy that we can put into the universe, [inaudible 00:11:29] these things build. And, and so, I think it’s, one thing that you touched on, know, I think it’s very interesting about this space is, I was probably a little bit sheltered in my undergraduate studies. I just assumed that everyone, that got a programming job out of college was a computer science major.

JW: And you can talk about psychology and theater. And, my first job, I was at a training facility with PriceWaterhouse Coopers, and I’m surrounded by music majors and English majors and all these different CS was kind of the exceptional as opposed to the common thread. And I think, one of the interesting things about that is you have all these different perspectives and can maybe brag on you a little, I mean, apology background you have a natural level of empathy and understanding and insight problems that some of us see us dorks and the down there in the code. Right.

PM: It’s funny, you mentioned that too, because I had the reverse thoughts going in my head. In other words, when I started doing programming stuff, I was 100% sure that I was the worst person in every room I was in because I was like, but I didn’t, I didn’t study this. How am I supposed to be competent? You know what I mean? I had to-, I sort of grew by beating the crap out of myself every day and oh, you better spend every lunch time digesting all of the stuff from the blogs and whatever else. And then eventually I realized as I got on bigger and bigger teams, that the thing that you saw was actually true that like most of the people around me also were not comp-sci people. But one of the reasons I love tech is because of the thought diversity now, let’s be clear, there’re other kinds of diversity that are not quite that way in tech, but like the learning and expertise diversity is quite, it’s quite large. And I love it for that reason.

JW: Yeah. I think in the enterprise software space, there’s that business to it. I’ve worked around engineers that used to work on space shuttles that transitioned over in the biz app world, and it just circuits their brain, like this is nebulous. And how do you talk about these requirements? And there’s my formal calculus and it’s more art than science. And trying to-, I always talk about, applied technology. That’s, what this is. It’s having detailed conversations with customers, understanding business problems to figure out how can I make your world better just by writing code. It’s more than that. So I hope that this kind of a forum where we can, can delve into those kinds of issues.

PM: Me too. And I think that’s a great place to sort of do the cut us off here. So let’s not get bogged down in this. Let’s say, Hey, everyone, we hope you’re jazzed to listen to our future episodes where we talk to people that we think are really cool, but right now, this is everyone here at Switched On, signing off. See you guys later

JW: Looking forward to it, everyone.