I've watched my son grow up to the last four years and change, surviving a string of "firsts" while he learns to survive in this world. He's also taught me many things about my job, more than I'd ever learn in a class. More than anything, he's taught me what is in store for the [...]
The Growth of a Programmer
Writing software is hard. I'm reminded of that every time someone asks me to teach them. The basics are convoluted, the syntax weird. It's 100% logic that you have to hold in your head while you craft words that semantically make little sense, unless you're a compiler or interpreter. Eventually, the programmer gets the basics [...]
Scala and Friends
Scala is an interesting language. I needed to pick it up for a project at work and was enthralled. I love some of the elegance of it, while some of the challenges are downright insane. One point of view that I've come to embrace from working with PHP, is that types are fungible. In Web [...]
Thoughts on Being Weird
I have been called weird nearly my entire life. It's never really bothered me, and perhaps that also contributes to my "weirdness." I suffer from a startingly rare disease, called a photographic memory. It doesn't work like the movies. I can't flip pages in a book and read them later. Simply because the part of [...]
Being an Alien
We've been in the Netherlands just over a month. It has been hectic. We went through a Makelaar (real estate broker) to find our place before we arrived. We spent the first two weeks getting furniture at IKEA and staying in an Airbnb, signing the lease, doing the walkthrough, getting utilities setup and we had [...]
Getting Ready To Move
The last week has been a whirlwind of activity. We've been putting things into storage, deciding on a place to live, and getting ready for the big move. To say that it's been stressful is an understatement. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it and then I remember that it is, of course. Moving is [...]
The Data Science Paradox
Let's talk about organisms for a moment. All multicellular organisms on earth have DNA. It's a strand of proteins that tell a cell in the organism how to grow, when to divide, and what proteins to build. You can read the DNA to discover what color eyes the organism might have, or how tall it [...]
‘Ello World
I'm just playing with 🤔🤣😂😱
#!$% Features
Some would say features are the life blood of an application. They're not. Features are bloat. Features cause bugs and require maintenance. Features get in the way of value. Delete features, build something that matters. Way back in the day, I had a product. It allowed tagging inventory with a location in the warehouse and [...]
Outside the Cyrstal [ Chapter 2 ]
I felt sick. I hated going outside the Cyrstal. Outside the Cyrstal, in the sun, electronics didn't work right unless they were heavily shielded. Communications were near impossible. It was nothing but sand. There's nothing left alive on earth except what can be protected by a Cyrstal, and since the sun started dying, there's probably [...]