A brief attempt at describing myself
I'm a human being. This is important, because there are a lot of bots out there today, and chances are you've debated with one and didn't even know it. I just wanted you to know that I'm not one of those malicious bots that pose as humans and I respect your feelings.
Aside from that, I enjoy creating, learning, and helping people. Creation in any form that I've had a hand in gives me a satisfying feeling, especially when I can see or hear about my creation being enjoyed. Constantly learning is something I thought would get tiring, but I've found that it's invigorating when I can finally apply my newfound knowledge in the world or my life. When I'm able to help people with things I've created based on concepts I've learned, I'm a really happy bot. I mean human. Although, just helping people is rewarding in general. There are of course more aspects to me, but I'm highlighting these aspects of myself for the sake of brevity.
A brief attempt at describing what I do for a living
I develop software for a living. I have been doing this professionally since February 6, 2012. I have mainly developed under the Microsoft stack of technologies, specifically with C#, .NET and SQL Server. This is not to say that I'm averse to other languages and frameworks. On the contrary, some of my more interesting projects involved creating a propositional checker using Haskell for a self-study project in university. Building something with functional programming took a lot of mental effort initially, because it's a very different way of developing applications. It definitely left a lasting impression on me about the expressivity of functional programming and how easily functions can compose in this paradigm. More recently, I also did some work with Node.js and Socket.IO to update a PC to tablet video call feature.
Currently, I'm working as a Lead Developer (officially, Development Lead) for a local forging company. I started as a developer, and when there was a vacuum in leadership, I threw my hat in, because I felt I could apply some of my previous experience and make a positive impact. It's been an adjustment to not code as much, but I'm learning a lot about leadership and I'm still able to code, so I'm happy.
A brief attempt at describing how I keep up on technical trends and skills
- See what's happening on Hacker News
- I skim through tweets from people I find interesting or say interesting things about technology or business. Some specific people in particular order include:
| Person | Reason |
|---|---|
| Steve Yegge | Having worked for Google and Amazon, he has some insightful information about the tech industry and advice for software engineers. His rant game is strong. |
| Courtland Allen | His newsletter talks about trends of what founders are creating, which eventually bigger companies latch onto. |
| David Heinemeier Hansson | I like hearing his critique on popular development trends to provide a balance to what's out there. |
| Patrick McKenzie | I can find insightful comments about software and business from Patrick. |
| Troy Hunt | I hear about security breaches here first. |
| Shawn Wildermuth | He's usually trying new things out and asking questions that I ask myself. He has some great tutorials. |
| Scott Hanselman | A prolific blog poster, creator, tinkerer. He's usually doing something new and interesting. |
| Stephen West | This fine gentlemen talks about philosophy in an approachable way. He single-handedly expanded my horizons. |
| SwiftOnSecurity | A systems security expert, who provides, helpful, hilarious, and strange (I mean that in flattering way) information. I think her actual name is Taylor Swift. |
- Write about technology that I find interesting.
- Have a project on the go that I can experiment with.
Some tools that I have used and found incredibly useful and cool
- Greenshot - Helps me easily explain something with screenshots
- Hangfire - Easily run scheduled jobs in .NET
- Audit.NET - An audit logging library that is highly customizable
- Serilog - An excellent logging library
- AutoMapper - Why map objects manually when you can do it automatically?
Final words
Anyways, if I come up with any more pertinent details about myself, I'll be sure to let you know.
You can find me trying to socialize on twitter