I decided to (finally) create a blog in order to organize my thoughts around technical topics I am either interested in or presently working with. Sometimes as developers we go through solving a problem with the aid of help from disparate sources and we think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to just write it all up in one place?!?!” A successful developer also has to spend quite a lot of time learning new techniques, languages and even domains. I find that writing helps me to articulate, organize and integrate new knowledge.
I will keep this blog focused specifically on technology. I will not veer off into politics or really anything of a personal interest here. This blog is for my professional enrichment and not meant to be a soapbox outside of the technical arena.
I have not had a typical journey into this profession. I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Religion because at the time I was an undergraduate, I was fully set on being a rockstar. I couldn’t have cared less about school and so I took classes that were applicable to my personal interests at the time and which I felt could help me define my psychology as I transitioned into adulthood.
By the mid-90s, my band had broken up. I had been around computers since I was very young, thanks to my grandfather, so I already knew the basics of protocols building toward what we know today under the collective term “the internet” – Usenet, WWW, Gopher, Finger, etc. I had a real interest to learn in depth how this all worked and so I took a two week “Learn to Webmaster” vocational course. From there I got an entry level job doing help desk support for an ISP in Alpharetta, GA.
I KNEW I didn’t want to do that forever so when an entry level programming opportunity was announced within the company to work on an internal accounting system, I jumped on it. I was getting paid less than $20K/year but I got exposed to a bunch of real-world technology – Cold Fusion, Windows NT 4.0 Administration, Informix, C on Unix as well as bash scripting.
The most amazing thing about this first job was that one day, I had an epiphany – I was really good at this! Here was something I seemed to have an affinity for and could possibly dedicate my life toward. It was the first time I’d had an experience like that and I’ve never looked back since.
These days I am most interested in distributed systems architecture – microservice-based, reactive and event driven, or a little of both – based on the principles of Domain Driven Design. I am currently engaged in the Dell Technoloies IoT Solutions division helping to build the open source EdgeXFoundry project. I feel fortunate at this point midway into my career to ride yet another wave of massive innovation that will change all of our lives in ten years’ time. In my twenties, it was the advent of the world-wide web. In my forties, it’s now the Internet of Things along with Artificial Intelligence that is going to absolutely change the world.
I will acknowledge one personal item in closing, but I won’t be talking about this on my blog or Twitter or any other channel. I owe a tremendous debt to Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism for helping me over the years to become a rational, productive member of society. If you are scouting me for a position at your company and you feel this to be a threat to your office culture in these days of echo chamber politics, then yours is not a company I’d care to work for anyway. I don’t bring my politics to work and I expect my co-workers to offer the same courtesy.