About Me

I'm a former software engineer and manager of software engineers.  While my experience has predominantly been in the travel industry, I've kept up with trends across technology and the greater business world at large that I've always felt comfortable saying I work in Tech.

The aim of this blog (at least initially) is to document my journey back into a hybrid hands-on/management role as I explore entrepreneurial angles.  I've always been a huge fan of the various facets of software engineering and computer science.  While I expect the blog's focus to change over time, the principal aim is to document methods and tools that remove unnecessary complexity from systems, while also maintaining scalability, so people can put their ideas into practice faster and feel less overwhelmed by software industrial complex.

I've often thought businesses in general - and software engineers in particular - have a tendency to overcomplicate issues, usually in the search to cover all possible edge cases that a customer may encounter.  Luckily, given the modern state of technology, there are a lot of options to offload complexity elsewhere without removing the joy (or practicality) of software development.

I expect that for those of you who consider yourselves software purists, some of the ideas I plan on exploring may seem like blasphemy (for example, the thought of using WordPress to maintain a website doesn't turn my stomach).  The expanding universe of tech tools can be intoxicating, but the desire to find quick, elegant solutions to problems is a greater draw.

If you're interested in my technical bona fides (or lack thereof), they follow:

• Java has consumed most of my professional career.
• Erlang is a not-too-distant second.
• I have the requisite knowledge of frontend technologies that accompanies the stereotypical "backend engineer" experience.  Despite that stereotype, I have come to regard HTML, Javascript/ES6 and CSS affectionately.
• I've used Python for a glue language and prototyping and love it.
• My initial professional experience used PHP, C, C++, and C# extensively.
• I've dabbled in several other languages.  They tickle me to varying degrees, but as long as they're practical, I'm willing to use them.  Cobol's about the only language I detest because of its combined verbosity and ability to write inscrutable code no later than line 10 of the data section.
• I have experience with a lot of the other supporting tools and languages that define the typical software engineering experience that are too numerous to mention in a brief list format (SQL, XML, JSON, etc).
• As hinted above, along with simplicity, I'm interested in scalability.  Much of my career as an engineer and a manager has been dealing with the scalability of large systems.

Outside of the software world, I like to cook, play guitar, and learn languages.  I know Spanish, French, and Mandarin (in that order of expertise and all fairly poorly - but, hey, it's fun).