Introduction to the Site

I suppose I should start here by introducing this site, what I intend to do with it and any other crazy ideas that might be rattling around in this head of mine.

The genesis of this site probably started over a decade ago.  Back then, I had a subdomain of outsidetheworld.com, a site owned by a great friend of mine (amazingly, at the time of this posting, the site is still up and available).  The site I ran was called Difference of Opinion and it was a bit scattered.  I had a sub-site of my own subdomain (I know, I know) that was a review site for comic books.  I would write reviews of the books I was reading and a friend of mine would also write reviews of books he was reading.  Since we would often read the same books, our reviews were intended to show a, *ahem*, "difference of opinion" on the comics.  At least, that was the idea.  Turned out that I was really the only one who did the reviews on a consistent basis.

Meanwhile, back on the main site, I started to tinker with writing my own personal blog and posting code files.  At the time, I was in my final year at the University of Arizona and was finishing up my degree in Computer Science.  I had decided that I would learn the typesetting language TeX (because I had nothing better to do with my spare time, I guess) and started taking notes in my theory of computation class with it.  I had gotten to the point where I was able to draw finite state machines as fast as the instructor could draw them with a TeX package I had downloaded.  The fact that these TeX files looked amazingly complex and produced very nice looking PDF files made me want to, well, show them off in some way.  So I uploaded them to a section of the site.

I never really wrote about the code that I posted.  I just placed them on the site for anyone to find them.  Whether or not anyone actually DID find them without my explicit direction is something that I'll never know (my guess is, no, nobody ever did).  After a while, I lost interest in the site and it went defunct.

As I got into the workforce, I started maintaining my own library of code snippets and little writings about solving code problems that I would come across on the projects that I was working on.  Back in the days before StackOverflow and similar sites, it was not real easy to find answers to very specific questions or to find tutorials that would be more advanced than the beginning introduction to the subject.  "Hello, World"-type tutorials only take you so far.  As a side note, I don't know how people figured out those weird problems in the days before the internet.  Props to you, old school programmers!

Even with the advent of sites like StackOverflow and Pluralsight, there were still some subjects that I would come across where I couldn't find an answer that I found satisfactory when I was trying to really get in to the details of a programming subject.  It was with that thought that I decided to start compiling those notes and documents that I would write for myself and put them on a tech blog, hopefully helping out other people that had those same sorts of questions that I had.  By no means do I assume that I'm more insightful, smarter or any better at coming up with solutions than others in the software industry.  There are surely many, many people who are far smarter and better developers than I am.  I just happen to be someone who wants to subject himself to more work on a side project (what is wrong with me?).

And since I was already setting up a site, I figured that I would use a part of that site to write about whatever else piqued my interest.  Hey, it's my site!  Potential subjects include music, sports (in particular, Arizona Wildcats sports and Manchester United) and random tech stuff.  If you click into the Ramblings section, you step into my world.  You've been forewarned.

So that's it!  Hopefully, there will be content here in the near future that is useful to someone out there.  If not, at least I have a little portion of the internet carved out for myself!