I'm a software engineer. I started programming when I was 12 and haven't given up yet.

I'm a systems-view person, meaning I view the System as a collection of parts, and I like to know all the parts: application architecture, deployment infrastructure, network, performance, telemetry, etc. I generally prefer the command line to IDEs in cases where the IDE buys me little. I do a lot of automation using bash, Python, and Perl. I'm adept at all things Cloud, Automation, and Infrastructure as Code.

I'm an API and Data Jockey.

I've authored and taught a course on REST APIs in Springboot.

I'm adept at various dialects of SQL, as well as noSQL DBs like Dynamo and Redis.

I work with streaming data, like Kafka, and appreciate using queues to introduce stability into a system. I love Rich Hickey's quote: If you aren't using queues, use them. And if you are, use them more! He's referring not to external queue products like Rabbit or Kafka, but rather Clojure's built-in queue mechanism (in core.async). I could mention Go's channels in the same breath. And Reactive programming (like Java's Project Reactor and WebFlux) provides similar results in terms of using backpressure as a system regulator.

Finally, my outlook on how to design data models is inspired by DDD; the Law of Demeter; and in general the principle of loose coupling and interface independence and segregation (one of the SOLID principles). I sincerely believe that simplicity and decoupling are two of the most important ingredients in quality software. And if your AI doesn't know that, maybe you should be in charge of writing code - NOT AI.

I'm fascinated by all things Data. I'm particularly fascinated by Modern Search, NLP, ML (the classic algortihms), and AI (particularly as it relates to Actual Understanding, as opposed to slapping some vaocab into an LLM).

I have a collection of Lists (of lists ...) So basically, I Collect Data. Really. That's what Moocho Me and Datagator are all about.

I like Languages (the human kind as well as the computer kind). I collect translations of a few books, foremost among them Le Petit Prince.

I have a very unwieldy collection of glassware, consisting of beer glasses from the dawn of my travels.

Also unwieldy is my collection of books (the kind made out of paper).

Here's my tech stack journey, working from the future backwards ... more or less:

OCaml
Lua
Julia
Rust
Zig
<NOW>
Java
Spring
R
Go
Swift
Objective C
Typescript
React
Python
Elm
YAML
Kotlin
JSON
Clojure
Scala
Ruby
C#
XML
Javascript
CSS
Java pre-beta
Ilog Rules
OPS5
CLIPS
FORTRAN
Regex's
Perl
VB
C++
HTML
Tcl, Tk
SQL
LISP
Prolog
bash
csh
C
Pascal
6502 ASM
Applesoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC