Software Executive, Presenter, Dad.
Pinnacle 21 adopted Shape Up in early 2021, so we’ve been using it just about as long as anyone who didn’t invent it! I talked about the methodology and our experience with it at Philly ETE in April of 2023. The session video is now online and viewable by the public.
Chris Wink (Founder of Technical.ly) interviewed me about my work in the Philadephia software community and our recent efforts and restoring the in-person meetup culture. The video is available, but requires a LinkedIn account to view.
I was invited to speak at Villanova University on Management and Organizational design.
I had the pleasure of joining a panel at Philly ETE in April of 2022. I think the virtual format is better than in-person for panels, and we had some great questions from the audience! The video of the panel is now online.
I was a guest of Ken Rimple’s on TechChat today. It’s a series where he covers current events in technology with members of the broader technology community. We talked about some great stuff - my favorite topic was The Missing Semester of your CS Education, which I’m still thinking about. There’s 9 other episodes in the TechCast Archive already, with more to follow I’m sure.
I had the good fortune tonight to present “Functional Programming in Java” to the membership of the Philadelphia Java User’s Group. Beginning with Java 8, the Java language architects made a concerted move to become “more functional.” To best understand what this means and how to take advantage of the new language features many programmers in the Java ecosystem will need a crash course in…
I’ve had a lot of fun in recent years playing games like The Resistance, and Jackbox Games. The two biggest obstacles to my enjoyment for both have been the player limits and issues with portability. For both, there have been times where people have had to sit out and watch, or a group wanted to play but couldn’t because we hadn’t planned ahead properly. I wrote a game to address some of those…
I had a fun experience at NEScala 2019 last week. We realized about 3 minutes before a speaking slot that there was a flaw in our speaker confirmation process and that not only was the speaker not there, we hadn’t realized it until that moment. I had been planning to share some of my recent work at the “Unconference” and accellerate that to present the work on the “big stage.”
This is another piece I saw in the archives as I was moving my old files to the cloud. Right around the time my oldest child started elementary school, I wrote out all of my thoughts on the way college works and what students should do to prepare themselves for it. I never really did anything with it beyond talk about it and show it to a few people.
When I decided to experiment with functional streams and worked to build a WebSocket application using http4s. I chose that platform because TypeLevel has a lot of velocity right now, especially with fs2 (Functional Streams for Scala) in the cats ecosystem. I struggled at first, because the WebSocket examples were too simple for my use case. Fortunately, the contributors to http4s are very…