When you’re a developer (or perhaps even a normal power-user), you seem to
acquire a bunch of custom config, scripts, and tools over time. Often, these are
little snippets. A one-liner command alias that you paste into ~/.bashrc. A
custom format for your PS1 prompt. A default setting for Vim.
This year, Computer Science Education Week will be December 7-13, 2020. In honor of CS Education Week, I wanted to write this blog post about the first computer game I wrote, and what I learned along the way. I was about thirteen, and this story picks up near where I left off in my previous blog post about my first computer program. When I wrote that blog post in 2017, I was working mostly from memory. Since then, I actually found an old floppy disk with my game on it. And finding that old floppy disk got me thinking about about how much I learned from writing computer games in my childhood, and how much others might be able to learn from writing their own first computer games today.
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The Social Dilemma came out about a month ago and got a lot of people thinking about the influence the internet and social media have on their daily lives. I’m a programmer, and I’ve worked for an internet advertising company, so none of this was new information to me. But for a lot of the American public, watching The Social Dilemma was an eye-opening experience into the ways that internet companies try to track and manipulate people. Many of my friends used words like “unsettling” and “eerie” to describe how they felt after seeing the film, but most of them also weren’t really sure what to do about it. They weren’t sure how to make positive changes in their own lives.
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I'm a Web Software Engineer at Strava. I have experience in a range of technologies including Linux, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Java, SQL, Javascript, and Android. In my increasingly scarce free time, I develop some websites and Android apps. I maintain ConfessIt, an app for Catholics, with a 4.5 star rating after more than 550 reviews and 28,000 downloads.
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Colorado School of Mines in 2011 with a degree in computational and applied mathematics; I subsequently completed a Master's of Education at the University of Denver as part of the Denver Teacher Residency. After a short stint of full-time teaching, I returned to the field of software engineering at SpotX, where I worked for 3 years before joining Zen Planner and finally moving on to Strava.