Hello, World!
This is a little programming-oriented blog powered by the Ghost platform. (I'm using Ghost as I'd rather spend the majority of my time dedicated to some bleeding edge projects than developing my own blogging engine in Rails or Node or fighting with WordPress (PHP—the scourge!). If you're also interested in running one of these relatively painless blog things, you check out the very same GitHib repository I used to make this one.)
Who This Blog Is For
This blog is really only for myself (all blogs are for their bloggers, but few bloggers will make that admission). It may additionally be of interest for programmers (professionals and hobbyists), aspiring programmers, and possibly those wanting to stay up to date on some of the cool technological happenings of our time. I usually try to explain everything I do, and I like to think that I give good intuitions, so this blog will, I hope, be of use to those wanting to learn and understand some stuff.
About Me
Somehow in this crazy, spinnin' world, I ended up a developer, which surprises me because I always thought I was going to end up a homeless feller (although, to some, there is no distinction betwixt the two).
NOTE: The rest of this section grazes over a bunch of words that have no meaning to non-developers, and is not intended to be instructive in any way.
My first programming language was, regrettably, ActionScript. I know, right? The reason was that I played with Macromedia tools (wanting to hone some animation skills to participate in the fan-revival of one of my favorite cartoons) when I was 12 and joined a Clock-Crew-derivative Flash animation group. I have no shame, which is why I'm explaining all this. Well, I have some shame, as I'm not going to specify which group.
Using Flash, I stumbled into ActionScript and found myself trying to make games. Fast forward a few years (skipping some time I spent dedicated wholly to musical instruments), and I was making websites (logos, art, HTML, CSS, a teeny bit of JS, and very rarely some PHP) in order to pay for college housing and scammy fees. I majored and graduated in some hybrid arts and computers abomination program and took C++, Java, Ruby, Objective-C, and C# courses. (I play with Node and Python on occasion.)
Now, I've been doing Rails projects for quite a while (worked as the sole developer for a Bitcoin startup in 2013–2014), though my day job these days is doing .NET MVC stuff. (To keep myself from becoming too bored, I like to leverage all the cool fancy C# features (but sometimes resorting to hacking up CIL) to make awesome tools in keeping with the Ruby paradigm of ease for the programmer.)
What I'm currently interested in (code-wise) these days seems to be Ethereum. I've become fairly proficient in Solidity, as I've got a few projects in mind, so expect some blog posts with some cool patterns and solutions.
Cracking the Blog Code
This is something like the eighth blog I've started in the past ten years. Typically, and I imagine this is common, I start up a blog, do one post and forget about it or lose interest. Well, no more! (I hope.) I suspect the trick to getting into the habit of regular blogging (which, like all things, should never be done for the sake of itself) is to declare in advance the next post topic and date so that there is a deadline.
Tune in next week (possibly) for the first real post: Introduction to Solidity for Non-Programmers!