Posts

Not wanting another project, I created another one: Dogs Of Newport. One of my goals for this year is to start retaking photos. Not just take pictures but also make photos. Spend time trying to get something decent out of the box we call a camera. One of my favorite subjects is the dogs in the town. As a dog owner, a chunk of my daily is set aside to care for my four-legged best friend. During this time, I meet other four legged creatures around town. Some fantastic dogs are in town, and even more come to visit over the summer. ...

I’m working with a friend on a top-secret project I hope to tell you more about soon. Still, because my friend likes functional programming, I’m dusting off some of the material I learned in college at Villanova and better understanding some concepts that escaped me back then. What is Clojure What is Clojure? Clojure is a Lisp-like, functional programming language that compiles jar files to run on the JVM. This means it will run anywhere you can run Java. It also means you can use existing Java libraries in your Clojure code. ...

Forgive the vagueness of this post, but this week has been a hard week where I’ve had to let go of a big commitment in my life. It’s personal. I’m devastated and hurting, but I know this was the path forward. Letting it go was hard for me, and it comes with many complex emotions, including fear of abandoning people who depend on me. I’m shirking some responsibility that I had previously assumed. ...

Almost 13 years ago, my life changed. I had recently left Motorola after Google acquired us and was looking for my next opportunity when I found a company called Cabulious, which was pretty quickly renamed to Flywheel. When I joined, they asked me if I’d be interested in working on the mobile team, specifically iOS, despite having minimal experience in Objective-C. When I joined the company, they sent me to New York to work with our Pivotal Labs Team (we could only get the team in NY, not the one in California, because they were too busy). The leader of our project, Adam, was one of the maintainers of Cedar, an Objective-C Unit testing framework that Pivotal Labs used to build TDD code. Cabulous had just hired a new leadership and was taking the existing product that had been written in some language that could be ported to both iOS and Android and shifting it to native products to increase the reliability and stability of the project. ...

A friend gifted me a banjo a few months ago, and I’m obsessed with it. I have tried a bunch of musical instruments in my life but stuck with none. I did the viola for a year in fourth grade. I tried piano for a semester in 10th grade, and I’ve picked up several ukuleles in my time. None of them have gotten me to practice. The Banjo is a different being. I want to practice it daily. I want to hear the single strings being plucked one at a time and practice my finger rolls. I’m practicing the four chords I know (yes, one is entirely open). ...