Hello!

So nice of you to drop by my GitHub profile. Pull up a chair, put your feet up, and relax! If you have a moment, I can tell you a bit about myself, my history as a developer, and some of the stuff I'm working on.

If you just want to know what I'm working on, you can skip down to the bottom.

First, some non-programming stuff about myself!

I live in New Westminster, BC; in a townhouse that I'm trying to make smart with Home Assistant so that I can be lazy ( or so when I forget to turn off the AC in my office it gets turned off automatically 😅 ). I live with my partner and our baby girl, who has somewhat up-ended our lives since she arrived.

I'm a big fan of science fiction and fantasy literature, and comics. I like running TTRPG campaigns, especially in the Numenera system -- and I've got a shelf full of systems I haven't had a chance to play yet. I've also recently joined a curling group for other tech dads in New West.

I've also got ADHD, which means I've dabbled in a bunch of hobbies, including but not limited to:

• podcasting
• blacksmithing
• woodworking
• molding & casting with silicone & urethane
• typewriters
• vintage electronics
• the harmonica

I've been interested in computers since I was a kid and my parents bought an Apple IIc. At some point they bought an IBM PC that came with Gorillas, a video game where you play as a gorilla throwing bananas at another gorilla. I got my first taste of programming by modifying the source code so that my gorilla threw much harder and the AI player threw much worse.

After that, my next taste of programming was in high school. In grade 11, I encountered Linux for the first time, along with Perl. I ended up building a character generator for D&D 3.5 that could randomly generate characters from any of the races in the Players Handbook. It was a spaghetti code mess, but it worked! I lost the source code for that at some point -- which honestly is probably for the best. It was not easy to read.

After that I kept learning and playing around with programming on my own, learning some bits of C++, Java, and PHP while finishing high school and starting college. In college I enjoyed the networking class where I got to play with Cisco routers & switches, which has since come in handy now that I've got a homelab!

I didn't end up finishing college -- a downside to ADHD is that I found the courses immensely boring because I already knew most of the programming stuff.

Despite not finishing, I did end up getting a job as a developer through a ridiculous chain of a friend who know someone who know someone ( with some of those folks being on opposite sides of the country ). In the interview, the lead developer who was interviewing me told me "well, you don't have any experience but you sound like you know what you're talking about" -- and gave me a two-week contract. That was how I started my two years at Zeros2Heroes Media, helping to build a mini social network in PHP!

Since then, I've worked at a few other places. I've moved from PHP to Ruby, and then from Ruby to Go -- my current favorite language.

At the moment most of my time is taken up by work and baby, so I don't have much spare time.

However, I do have one project I can highlight at the moment:

When I worked at Biba, I handled porting the report generation from a handful of Python & R scripts to Go. As part of that I needed a version of the Bradley-Terry Model so that I could generate a list of the preferred pieces of equipment at a playground. I didn't want to have to call out to a Python or R script to generate the data, so I built a version of the library in Go.

It's listed on the Awesome Go site in the Science & Data Analysis section!

Unfortunately, everything else I've done is either in a private repository or isn't in a state where I can show it off yet.

However, if you want to read about some of the stuff I've done for previous places I've worked, my LinkedIn page is a good place to read about the stuff I've done for other companies.