A “little” bit about me

Here, you will find information on me and my plans for the blog. Eventually, this will get separated out into respective sections on the site with strictly information about me in one section, while future updates are relayed elsewhere. I’m just too excited (and my cache gets cleared a little too often) for me not to type them out now. So, look forward to less walls of text. Thanks!

Professionally Profesional

Some professional background and aspirations.

Some Background

Professionally, I tinker with, break, build, ponder, question, curse, love, and solve issues (not necessarily in that order, but it’s close) all things web development. I started out as a software developer in Java, but have since transitioned from a full stack web dev to primarily a backend engineer in Haskell. In my professional journey, I have tried to become whatever was asked of me at the time. I believed that a positive attitude and outlook on change would help me grow more as an individual and software engineer. Plus, learning new stuff is just really swell, mister!

Seriously, though, learning new things brings about a sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, and pride that cannot be rivaled. Because of this, I have a great mix of experience in Object Oriented and Functional programming that not all posess. I feel this gives me a unique perspective on issues and problem solving. I also feel that the choices I have been given allow myself to grow more as a software engineer who understands general concepts and paradigms instead of being pigeonholed into one type of development or language. If I do not know something, I will accept the challenge and embark on a quest to learn it. I have come into contact with a myriad of tools, programming languages, frameworks, and technologies. I believe one of the best things you can do is to keep getting out of your comfort zone for a bit and diving into something new. You may hate it or love it after your experience with it, but at the end of the day you have grown from it.

For example, at work I use the NVIM and Atom text editors on MacOS or Ubuntu. Now, as I type this out at home, I am using VS Code on Windows. Exposing myself to different things constantly enables me to handle context switching and reduce cognitive overhead. That’s the idea, anyway, and it seems to hold true at this point in time. I still have my “comfort zone” that I go to, of course. The idea is not to do away with it completely, but to peek my head out and see the world from time to time.

I can’t take all of the credit for my professional development, though. There have been plenty of people who helped me along the way, and I very much appreciate them. My current (and previous) teammates where I work now are great examples of this. We all strive to encourage, help, and challenge each other and ourselves in what we do every day. The agency to experiment with new ideas and learn from failures has been invaluable. We face challenges with optimism every day, and set aside our pride and selfishness to work as a whole unit to achieve our goals.

Practice, Practice, Practice

This blog (and eventually, full-fledged website) is just a very small example of what I have learned. It’s a static site generated using the really nice Hakyll, which is a Haskell library for generating static sites. The blog is sitting in an S3 bucket on Amazon Web Services using Cloudfront as the CDN. I hope to expand more on that as time allows, and I make more blog posts. I’m looking to have a RESTful API with some fancy data shenanigans on the front end. I’m also going to try my hand at Advent of code with some Haskell solutions. My posts will be written with as much transparency as I can manage. I find it extremely useful (and, in a lot of cases, reassuring) to see how someone arrived at an answer with all of the struggles and thought processes they went through.

Personally Personal

For an introvert, I have a lot to say. As an introvert, I realize that not everyone is interested or even cares. However, if you do, you can read about me until you go cross-eyed.

Rockin’ Dad Bod

When not slamming my fingers, hands, and/or face into my keyboard at work, I try my best to not screw up being a full-time dad and husband. It’s super hard work, but incredibly rewarding. I love both my wife and daughter like they were… my wife… and daughter? Not sure what else I could say to express that they mean the world to me. So, it confuses me to even try. Anyway, you get the picture. I’m pretty new to all of it. My wife and I have been married for a little over a year and our daughter still has that “new car” fragrance about her. They’re both pretty great, if a bit fussy at times. ;)

1v1 Me, Bruh

I grew up playing video games. My first system was a Nintendo Entertainment System I got in kindergarten, but I had played on an Atari and oldschool PC games before that. I played console and PC games ever since. I still love to go back to good ol’ classics like the King’s Quest and Quest For Glory series. Nowadays, when I make the time, I enjoy moonlighting as a gamer with aspirations to one day play through my entire Steam library #DontLetYourDreamsBeDreams. In a pretty sweet alternate reality, it would be a lucrative means of monetarial acquisition for me. Boardgames are quite very much indeed my jam, also. I like to work in Unity3d and Aseprite for game development and pixel art, respectively, when inspiration strikes. I hope to start posting weekly pixel art as part of my blog posts, soon–along with any game development happenings. Eventually, I would like to start posting daily in hopes to hone my ability, but, alas, there are only so many hours in a day.

Sidebar: Good grief, I have quite a lot of aspirations for my little corner of the internet. I’m looking forward to realizing most (if not all) of them. I feel it shall be a worthy challenge conducive to my character development a.k.a “levelling up.”

I Can Read, Ya’ll!

‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,’ said Jojen. ‘The man who never reads lives only one.’ - Gearge R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons

I love books. My favorite kind are fantasy/sci-fi fiction and anything related. However, if it is a good story it matters not what genre it belongs to–or even if it is non-fiction. What makes a good story you ask? Hell, if I know. I just know what I like. I believe my love of stories is what drives a lot of my gameplay and desire to make games, I think. (And, the fact that I am a closet-competitor.) The ability to create intricate, living worlds and take a reader/player on an adventure of a lifetime–sometimes actually affecting them emotionally and psychologically–is amazing to me. I have always been a firm believer that one can learn a lot about people and the world through both fictional and non-fictional stories. I can’t tell you how many books I have read that left a lasting impact on me in some shape or form–there are just too many to count. Stories are an amazing teaching tool, and this is no newfound revelation. Humanity has been using the power of storytelling, either written or word-of-mouth, for centuries. I could go on and on about my obsession, but I’ll spare you. However, don’t be surprised if you see some mediocre attempts at storytelling in some future posts. ;)

On With The Show

Obviously, I am pretty passionate about stories, games, and programming. However, I also take a great deal of pleasure doing and pontificating about the following (in no particular order):

homebrewing
craft beer
drawing/sketching (a little rusty here–I’m out of practice)
music and discovering music (Spotify has been a godsend)
embarking on culinary adventures (Mmmm, food)
fishing
praying at the Iron Temple – a.k.a. lifting weights
the beach. I grew up near and lived on the beach for a while, thus, it will forever feel like home.

Stay A While And Lis–Er, Read…

That’s a lot about me, but we’re only barely scratching the surface. It’s hard not to sound pompous and narcissistic when explaining to others that there is “more than meet’s the eye” about yourself or that “still waters run deep.” I actually hate writing about myself (except my interests, of course). I hate selling myself. It just feels grimy for some reason. I don’t know. I can’t stand windbags and have been bitten so much in the past by poor individuals stricken with the Dunning-Kruger effect that I’m overly cautious about portraying myself as such. So, I’m going to stop there and just let you decide for yourself whether or not “we could totally hang, bro.”

Spoiler: We could. :)