About Me

Twas dark and stormy night when I began a journey that would change my life... Meticulously following a PHP tutorial, I managed to start an Apache server and have it print “Hello World!”. It seemed insignificant at the time - I simply wanted to speed up development of a music & merchandise distribution platform I was building for indie bands. My 1st tech startup.

Instead I fell in love with coding. Writing code for 10 to 15 hours a day, I left behind my recording studio. Coding was everything I had wished recording was, deeply technical, creative and mind expanding. Recording was meant to be a field where technical, objective truths gave way to artistic goals. Instead confirmation bias and marketing hype won out over tests, measurement & data.

Coders fall back on what they can prove, debating the human elements of coding while cognisant that these are subjective matters. Object orientated vs functional, abstraction and modularity, useful concepts that help coders wade through the great expanse that is an unsolved problem, as daunting as the novelist’s blank page. Yet everything a developer does is ultimately assigning a symbol to a piece of memory and a series of instructions, in order to satisfy a human need - to communicate, understand, and empower. Objective truths lie in the computational resources required: speed, memory, and bandwidth.

Being a great coder isn’t my only goal, I also have this secret ambition to start a company that succeeds in creating a truly supportive and empowering culture. A company where everyone feels that their colleagues are their allies, that they can take risks without fear, and that people can work amongst truly talented individuals without hoarding their knowledge. You see, I believe a company’s first responsibility is to make its employees feel safe. I have a hunch that this is why we invented companies, as the modern tribe.

Here I write about the art and science of coding. I'm passionate about TypeScript, Node, and soft skills for programmers. Occasional advocate as a queer & disabled software engineer.