About

Hi there, I'm Ayron. This blog is my corner of the Internet where I talk about programming, projects, and the occasional personal or philosophical digression.

I've been tinkering and building with computers since I was a kid. The first time I saw Commander Keen running on the family 200Mhz Hewlett-Packard, I knew I wanted to understand the mysteries of the machine.

So I started learning. First HTML, making simple websites about video games I liked. Then I learned C and Visual Basic from secondhand books and manuals. Early on, I made little desktop apps, websites, and mods for games like Jedi Knight.

Long story short, I went on to get a degree in Computer Science and make a career in software engineering. I've worked for large companies — IBM, Willis Towers Watson, Amazon — a few startups, and a few mid-sized companies. My favorite languages are TypeScript and Clojure.

I see software engineering as a mix of science and art. It's a creative outlet. When people use and enjoy something that I created, it's a satisfying feeling. I think this quote from Fred Brooks captures it well:

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly re-moved from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month

Most of my work has been behind the closed walls of companies. Stuff I can't show publicly. That's why I started this blog. I want to share some of my work and ideas with the world. And I hope to connect and learn from fellow practitioners.