DevSource: What's the most important thing you learned in school?

Sells: I have to say that my experiences at school were less than satisfying. Every single one of my DevelopMentor ex-brethren are ten-times- better teachers than 80% of my college professors. The most useful thing I learned in school was how to get good grades without really thinking.

However, I did learn some very important skills at school. When I was choosing where to live during college, I had my choice between the Boy Scout fraternity (I was an Eagle Scout), an engineering fraternity, or a social fraternity. From high school, I felt that I had the goody-goody thing and the academic thing pretty well locked up, but I was a geek in need of a social life, so I moved into a frat. Between the need to keep my fraternity brothers from hating me and the need to keep my then-girlfriend (now wife) happy, I gradually knocked a lot of the rough social edges off. Those social skills opened the door to most of the subsequent opportunities I've had and helped me to make the most of them.

But it wasn't the social skills that were the most important thing I learned at school. The most important thing I learned is to constantly be looking inside myself for ways to grow and learn and develop. When I was an obnoxious, anti-social geek, I could have decided I was right and that the rest of the world was wrong (and certainly the whole world is wrong with alarming frequency), but that would have been an attitude guaranteed to keep me lonely and unhappy. Instead, I looked at how I could change my relationship with the world. The willingness to be introspective and to do something about what I didn't like is the most important thing I learned at school. This is a process that I'm continuously applying to myself because, as Don likes to say, “The largest room in the world is the room for improvement.”

DevSource: What's the most important thing you learned outside of school?

Sells: Hands down, the most important thing I've ever learned was how to understand something new and communicate it to others as a DevelopMentor instructor. These techniques aren't just technology related, either. I've applied these same techniques to other disciplines with great success. My hope is to someday learn how to be a successful novelist using the same skills I used to learn COM. Unfortunately, I have yet to succinctly learn how to describe the learning process itself, although that'll make one hell of a book when I do.

DevSource: What's the last book you read?

Sells: The last "book" I finished is a three-part comic book series called "Hard Boiled," by Frank Miller, that I pulled off my shelf for a nice re-read. Also, I'm in the middle of the following books (I can't read just one book for some reason):

• Deception Point, by Dan Brown (ok)
• The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown (recommended) (I'm on a bit of a Dan Brown kick lately. I also loved Angels and Demons, but hated Digital Fortress, because of the glaring technical inaccuracies.)
• Jennifer Government, by Max Barry (haven't decided if I like it yet)
• Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell (highly recommended)
• Landlord Tenant Rights in Oregon, by Michael Marcus (out of date)
• Introducing Longhorn for Developers by Brent Rector (recommended)

DevSource: What was the last song you listened to?

Sells: I was just listening to some Gregorian chant this morning. I can't really work and listen to music with lyrics at the same time, so I normally sit in silence, but sometimes turn on some "super learning" classical music that my wife turned me onto. When I'm in such a groove that nothing can stop me, I'll crank some '80s kiddie heavy metal like Queen or Def Leppard, some '90s alternative rock, like Nirvana or some of the latest pop stuff, like Kelis's Milkshake. I know that none of these choices are respectable these days, but what can I say; I'm a geek. : )

DevSource: What do you collect?

Sells: I absolutely love entertainment media, including books, DVDs, graphic novels, and PC games. My book collection is actually pictured online as a digital backup of my analog love.