Who?

I’ve been fiddling around with computers since my family’s Commodore 64 was the height of cool, and getting paid to build software for a good long while now. Once I discovered Ruby, I started writing about it, and the other lessons I’ve learned along the way.

If you look very closely at the dates in my blog, you might notice there’s a small kid sized gap. Yup, that’s because I’m a dad these days, and surprisingly that takes a lot of time!

In the gap, I’ve swung on the engineering manager vs engineer pendulum a few times and learned a ton in each role.

Snake’s Hands?

A while back I read a book, and it stuck with me. I couldn’t remember the author, the title, but a few scenes and passages stuck in my mind vividly and I’ve come back to it again and again. The book it turns out was Engine Summer by John Crowley.

Path is like a snake, […] when you run along Path, and here is something that looks to be Path, but you find it is only rooms interlocking in a little maze that has no exits but back to Path — that’s a snake’s-hand. It runs off the snake of Path like a set of little fingers. It’s also called a snake’s-hand because a snake has no hands, and likewise there is only one Path. But a snake’s-hand is also more: my story is a Path, too, I hope; and so it must have its snake’s-hands. Sometimes the snake’s-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

— John Crowley, Engine Summer