A Bit About Me...
While I've worn a lot of hats in my
professional career, the various titles or labels
have usually been euphemisms for
programmer. I got interested in programming
in college, where I studied electrical engineering,
and have been doing it (or something close to it)
for most of my career. I enjoy it a lot and it's
also one of my hobbies, I guess, at least if you
define a hobby as something you spend a lot of time
and money on! I'm currently using Python almost
exclusively, but the progression to Python includes
C, C++, Java and C# with offshoots into Awk and then
Perl on the scripting side, and HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript on the web side. I have a lot of opinions
on each of these languages, but those are topics for
another day...
Although my background is technical, most of my career has been spent in finance - the early part on the sell side (i.e. Wall Street brokerage firms) and the latter part on the buy side (in my case, hedge funds). I've found the mixture of technology and finance rewarding in a lot of ways: there are a lot of interesting problems in finance, it’s an industry where people use technology as a competitive advantage, the industry changes quickly so there are always new problems to tackle, you get to see your work in the hands of users very quickly (sometimes even the same day!), and working on a trading desk with all the interaction and banter (and yes, distractions) is a lot of fun. Oh, and there's that compensation thing, too. Working in finance does have some downsides, though. You don't always find many technical peers to bounce ideas off of - especially in smaller organizations like hedge funds. But that's partly what drew me to creating a blog ... the desire to talk about interesting topics and to discuss them with others online.
Originally, I used packaged blogware for this site (MovableType, then WordPress), then I went down the path of writing my own blog in Django. But I finally decided that was a distraction and have migrated my site over to RapidWeaver. I’m hosting it on my own virtual server under Linux.