On this episode we talk with Brett Terpstra, the coder, author and web developer behind apps such as Marked 2 and nvALT, and podcasts including Systematic and Overtired. Brett discusses how he got his start, lessons he's learned from freelancing, why it's vital to share your work, the importance of choosing the right clients, and much more.
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Show notes

Brett Terpstra: Website, Twitter, GitHub
Systematic
Overtired
Marked 2
nvALT
Scrivener
Ulysses

Transcript
Alexis: So Brett, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Brett: My pleasure.
Alexis: I don’t know exactly – well, I lied. I know exactly where to start, but I think there's a lot of ground to cover here. But before we get too far into things, we should say that Brett has a podcast called Systematic, and he also has one called Overtired. Go over there if you’ve got more time that you would like to fill with podcasts. I have to admit, I’ve only listened to Systematic, but when I first started listening, I went through about 40 episodes in a couple of days.
Brett: It’s a fun one.
Alexis: Yeah, 40 episodes in a couple of days is not something I regret, I tell you.
Brett: [Chuckles] I would say that Overtired is almost a different audience. It’s more pop culture and completely 100% random. We never know what we’re going to talk about when we sit down.
Alexis: No show notes?
Brett: We’ll brainstorm for about five minutes before we start recording, whatever pops in our head, and just talk about it. That’s with Christina Warren and it’s really fun. Both of them are over at esn.fm now.
Alexis: Anyway, let’s start from the beginning. How did you first start programming?
Brett: My dad brought home a PC junior – that would have been ’83 or ’84 – and I was six at the time. He basically just let us play with it whenever he wasn’t doing drafting or spreadsheets. I figured out a little bit of BASIC and a little bit of Logo, and King’s Quest I and Jumpman, and got really into making computers do things.
I was really fascinated with the idea of providing a series of commands that made something happen. Choices were limited back then or functionality was limited, but soon after you could program Lego with Logo and make robots and things, and that’s where it all started. Instantly, as soon as I had my fingers on a keyboard, this kind of obsession with making computers do cool things instantly began.
Alexis: I guess it’s a little misleading for me to start by asking you that question since you were also very firmly in the design side of things, especially early on, right?
Brett: See, that’s a part of the story. All through high school I ran a BBS and I spent a lot of time on Gopher and just working around the Web and Linux and having fun. I’m sorry, not the Web – the Internet, because the Web wasn’t really in existence until my later years of high school, and that’s when I got into building web pages.
It was the dawn of the web and things were not pretty at the time and that led me wanting to make prettier web pages and studying CSS more deeply. I went to school originally for Comp Sci after high school. In my second year, I withdrew from Calc2 and that was a required class. I just realized in that moment that I probably wasn’t going to get a computer science degree, so I went to art school. That's what everyone does, right?
Just quit and go to art school and I studied interactive multimedia there and got heavily into the design side but never stopped coding—even my interactive design projects were all based  on Director. I don’t know if anyone remembers Director but that used to be Macromedia and then became Adobe. Anyway, got into that and then after college I went more into design, started a design studio after having a job as an art director that I ha