Hi Friends!

I’ve revived this site as an alternative to social media since being lost in the din of noise only leaves me feeling empty. I have things to share!

Currently here I am working on some low-level software projects here to keep fresh in knowledge/practice, and formulating some ideas around my next big thing. I won’t say exactly what it is just yet, but it’s a project in Golang along the lines of music education and sight reading proficiency. This challenges two areas of knowledge in a way that has been truly eye-opening.

Music Ed is something I wanted to pursue in college but found working experience in the theater group I worked for… and burned out after only a couple of years. I’ve taught piano and can play a whole mess of different instruments as a result, and did so as an autodidact. I’ve picked up software development and methodologies in a similar way, but without the burnout …instead I’m facing more impostor syndrome issues. It’s slow going sometimes as revisiting concepts turns into many rabbit holes…

…and I have observers. Namely my daughter who is fascinated by my play-by-ear ability, and is at the “dick & Jane” level of reading music. Good foundations being built there, and perhaps a potential QA assistant in the coming months. My son, who is going into sixth grade knowing what a for loop is and how to assign a variable and act on it. Next year in school he will be taking some programming classes along with cello. He’s notably enthusiastic about both.

I’m pursuing a but more of the fundamentals of Go here as I’ve spent the past three years or so working with a distributed system that was written Golang. It’s a very versatile language that can do some particularly cool tricks and lends itself to modern hardware environments (multi-processor) readily. Go has a built in package manager (go get), an official code formatting tool (a formatting standard / de-linting), struct types and methods, unit tests/benchmarks, goroutines and channels, and awesome documentation. There’s plenty of good online resources for learning go, but I’m going to just mention Todd McCleod (https://github.com/GoesToEleven) as a fantastic and enthusiastic instructor of all things Golang. If you’re someone other than me reading this, and interested in some Go programming, check him out.

But also see: https://golang.org/

See also this very handy comparison of infrastructure as code – I’m a Terraform aficinado after supporting deployments on ‘cera’s platform for a while https://blog.gruntwork.io/a-comprehensive-guide-to-terraform-b3d32832baca

So in my growing years I continue to learn, and will share musings and thoughts here.

Also, it’s the start of 2018.