About Me.
But, mostly, about the things I enjoy and find worthwhile.
There's something peculiar and challenging about writing a page "About Me."
I think the aphorism "Know Thyself" is a task in which one hopes that they can always make meaningful progress on but never complete – the goal shifts as you grow, and you should always want to keep growing. Unfortunately (and strangely hopefully), that means I will never be happy with the way the page turns out!
TL;DR
aka The Big Picture
I'm currently employed as a Full-Stack Software Developer at a big church.
I enjoy working on a disparate set of things. I really like to learn and to be thrown at new problems.
I love the science of learning. I play drums. I've taken a deep interest in philosophy – especially epistemology, the nature of logic, and objective reasons for belief in God.
Milestones that Made Me
A Bit of Self-Discovery
I had to be one of my teachers' most dissapointing students. I always got by with decent grades, but I was unmotivated to learn. I wouldn't do homework and I never really gave any meaningful effort.
Still, I valued good grades and I wanted to do something worthwhile with my life, so I saw the value in things like AP classes.
I didn't technically meet the requirements for the AP Computer Science class. Yet, one of those teachers I disappointed regularly put me through anyways. Thank God.
I found a fire in myself while studying computer science. I was hungry to learn more. I experimented. I wrote prank programs that went fullscreen on my friends and resisted being closed. I would think about AP CS in other classes and would literally go home and read Teach Yourself Java (it was cool at the time) and watch too many online tutorials (including thenewboston, of course).
In CS, I finally found something I was motivated to learn more about and I established the very fruitful habit of engaging in edifying personal explorations on my own.
College
My High School experience gave me a really good foundation going into Clemson's Computer Science program. I graduated early having more credits than needed and the new knowledge that Balance Sheets and methods of depreciation are not particularly interesting (I almost did a Finance minor).
It definitely helped to have a group of incredibly smart friends who were also interested in doing well.
CS is a really broad field, and I don't think I ever really selected a specific niche while in College (or even since!). All of the problems CS tries to solve are interesting and similar in fundamental ways. So, I definitely enjoy working with a wide variety of technologies and, perhaps counterintuitively, I think jumping around and seeing how different paradigms approach the same problems is one of the best ways to learn (and to learn, especially, that the grass is not always greener on the other tech stack).
Also, Clemson started destroying college football during my time there. I think I might be the good luck charm. You're welcome. Go Tigers.
Marriage
I'm grateful to have married the greatest woman in the world, Cassidy.
Cassidy is a brilliant writer, vocalist, pianist, music-therapist, earring-artist, and wife. She's incredibly gifted and takes care that everything she does is done well.
She helps me grow and be better. She pushes me to keep trying or to try new things when I get stuck.
She also prevents me from buying more books to put on the bookshelf until I've read enough of the ones that we already have. Nobody's perfect, I guess.
Work
I've been working for Brookwood Church for the last 5 years.
One of the great benefits, a result of being the only developer, is that I've had to interface more with users than I think most developers get the chance to. It is one thing to develop a feature to a user story you read on a screen and present it to an internal stakeholder, it is another thing entirely to know your user by name, meet with them about what they need, and then share their coffee machine.
I am grateful that I get to have my hands in almost every aspect: configuring and customizing our CMS/CRM, designing administrative processes, copywriting, database administration, website development, reporting, advising on our uses of technology, and the list just goes on and on. I like being an information broker and helping people understand and use the tools available to them.
Skills Earned Along the Way
Here's a snapshot of some of the stuff I've worked with.
mxm.dev
StemmaStudy
brookwoodchurch.org
Here's an eclectic mess of skills and technologies I've used in some fashion in the past – in projects of sufficient complexity – that I think warrants inclusion. I'm definitely rusty on some of these. But, relearning is much faster than initial learning, so it's worth mentioning them!
JavaJSONPython 3Search Engine OptimizationSourceTreeAPIsData Structures and AlgorithmsWord VectorizationWeb ScraperVR in UnityGraph Search TechniquesIntroductory Machine LearningCopywritingSome Psychology and Cognitive ScienceDrumsC++CLI'sGoogle AnalyticsNeo4jiReport (with loathing)NuxtJSVueTailwindCSSOpenAI APIPrompt EngineeringSupabaseI'm sure I've forgotten to include some other weird things. But, the above's the bulk of it.
Besides, if we're being completely honest, there are really only three golden, fundamental skills that all of the above boil down to:
- The ability to comprehend documentation.
- The ability to discern when documentation needs to be read.
- The ability to endure the painful, writhing, existential agony of actually reading the documentation.
Fostering a hopeful curiosity helps hone all three of these skills.
Horizons
If all of my time was my own, I would choose to pursue these horizons. These are my most ambitious goals.
Considering that the only people capable of honestly and consistently living a self-doubt-free life would rightly be called lunatics, take the following with an understanding that I know how lofty they are. (In other words, don't think me a lunatic!)
Technologically Empowered Education
The modern idealization of education conceives of it in various linearities: attend an hour lecture, followed by the next lecture, and the next. Listen for large stretches of time as someone unfolds a stream of information and students try to jot down every word.
There are a myriad of issues this paradigm is subject to, one of which is the false homogeneity it assumes: every student is treated the same. The lost get more so, and the superstars get bored.
I believe it would be better if technology handled the distribution of informative material and the review of it. Then, we could stop treating the information as if it needed to unfold in the same order for everyone. In the real world, there are many paths to come to know the same information. We should let technology systematically find the best pathways for each student. This means we must also delinearize our curricula and make it, like the real world, more interconnected.
Superset Software
Most software problems have already been solved a thousand times over by many businesses. They simply lack the framework for reorganizing the solutions to those problems in different ways or, as well, the rights to use the solutions produced by others.
Many types of software services nowadays try to solve some of these perennial problems: Content Management Systems, Database Management Services, Form Builders, etc. I think one of the main problems with most all of them is that they are too opinionated. Any integrations between them are shallow.
I'm fascinated by model-driven architectures, and I would love to see that more heavily applied to software itself. Maybe in the form of a "Meta-SaaS" or "Code CMS".
The Foundations of Thought
What is truth? What can we know? What is knowing? What is a thought? Can a thought be fully described in terms of physical brain states? What is evidence? What is logic and how does it relate to language? Must we really trust "logical" conclusions? Are there limits to the conclusions it can reach? Should we, or even can we, doubt everything?
It should humble any person that there is so much controversy surrounding these most basic questions. I'm inspired by the incredibly genius attempts by philosophers in the past centuries seeking to get at the heart of these questions. In fact, I am almost horrified by the fact that these questions get so little attention in schools and churches, today.
Having adequate answers to these questions lays the groundwork for establishing ideas in the minds of others as respectable, believable, and, potentially, undeniable.
There's a lot of confusion and clash around these questions. I'd like to pursue more formal education on these questions (in the form of a Master's in Christian Philosophy) to help people make sense of the world along with their place and purpose in it.