Friday, December 29, 2006

Welcome to Madking's Musings

Welcome to my blog. I intend to use this as a forum to discuss my thoughts, experiences, problems, complaints, questions, and findings as a software engineer. My hope is that other programmers will eventually find this blog and share their own experiences and wisdom here, and maybe even learn something while they are at it.

This entry won't have any technical content, but rather is just an intro to who I am and what I want out of this blog. My goal is to publish roughly weekly and for most of the topics to be technically oriented. As I stated above, my main goal is to learn from others as I share my own thoughts, so please post any feedback you may have. Also, please feel free to suggest topics that I should write about.

As for my background, I am a software engineer who has been working professionally for more than 10 years. Before that I was at Case Western Reserve University where I received a BS in mathematics and an MS in computer engineering. I enjoy puzzles and competitions and still occasionally participate in programming contests at TopCoder under the handle madking. While I have programmed in a number of languages over the years, for the past 6 years or so I have primarily programmed in Java. Most of my professional experience is with doing back end “system” programming. The user level programming I have done has been limited to some web programming (JSPs and more recently Ruby on Rails) and some command line utilities. I am sharing this information because it is bound to influence my opinions, and it may help you understand where I am coming from.

Well, this intro has gone on long enough. Hopefully I'll have something more interesting to say in my next post.