Why?

vanity or public service

You decide. This blog is the result of a desire I’ve had for a long time to teach my philosophy of computing, to give back to the world something as specific as what I had recieved by self-teaching, from apprenticeship with mentors, from Astronomy, from colleagues, from the experiences of getting to follow up on lofty ideals about what computers and networking could mean to the world.

Some of those things I know better than now, but they have only been replaced by others. The Age of Information is hugely transformative. So much so it’s made transformative a buzz word, meaningless in the mouths of many. I felt in Hawaii especially I should teach classes, but I hadn’t, something always interferred… important things, like being a single father, like having other distractions in life, in work, but still, it didn’t happen.

Now I’ve left Hawaii, where I worked creating a new Data Processing system for a major observatory for over ten years, and moved to Maine. I need work. I’m in a new community, I need to learn about it. I need to meet people, my step-son needs to attend school, I need to go to Canada this weekend to see my wife’s family. But I really feel I don’t need to let that “interfere”. I’ve started working on a curriculum, a six session course to introduce people to programming using Javascript, providing a description of the architecture of the internet.

I’ve arranged to use the computer room at the local library in Bar Harbor, where I now live, but perhaps I can give it online as well. And I decided I ought to have this blog, and share my views of computing which at the very least are unique, and provide a working philosopher’s take on everything that’s happened, and what’s happening now, and perhaps help others willing and able to follow an autodidactic path into advanced software engineering.

I’ve also decided to start answering and possibly asking questions on Stackoverflow… it’s been so useful to me. I’ve decided to devote time to open source projects, and this blog will tell you about those. I need to find work, ideally work that allows me to stay in Bar Harbor which means remote work, unless I want to work at a laboratory that creates genetically modified mice, and that’s not even an easy job to get. I’d rather not.

I’m looking for independent contracting work, something I only started to do in earnest a few weeks ago. I do have a couple leads on jobs that developed over the months since I’ve left Hawaii in March of this year (historians, it’s 2014 at the time of this writing). Yes, I just spoke directly to history.

Did I mention I need work? I’d like to tell you how that’s going, because being out of the job hunt for ten years causes a bit of time-travellor shock when taken up again, in any industry I’d gather, but especially in programming. I’ve kept up, but I don’t speak quite the same language which has developed. In many ways it’s the technology that is catching up with me. Since 1992 I have developed applications which were distributed rather than centralized… we used to call the barely-structured internet “the cloud”… and now there actually is a cloud that commoditizes the CPU and other resources of the net just how we always tried to pretend it was when designing distributed systems. But explaining that to people is another matter… how it’s explained, and what to do with an industry that, when I started it, was full of people that had a hobbyists love for technology and found themselves in a groundswell, that subsequently had become padded with people attracted to the billions and billions of dollars. Not to knock billions of dollars mind you —- did I mention that I need work?

So I will tell you about that job search, and I will tell you how I got here, a Senior Science Software Engineer and Lead Programmer with a Degree in Philosophy from UC Berkeley, that he (I) got while working as a programmer for NASA and eventually UCB Astronomy Departement, the path through commercial software, the dot com boom, back to Astronomy, and now, back to the idea of remote work, whose time has surely come, has it not? Stay tuned.