Performed Well

Yesterday, I met with a friend of mine from a previous company where i worked for 3 years as an Angular developer.  He at a new company now but still working with Angular as the primary tech stack.  I found myself trying to recall a bit of what I knew about Angular... and totally drawing a blank. I was a full-time developer in this technology as recently as 2.5 years ago, and I found I couldn't even remember what the code looked like.  Would i even recognize my own code if i saw it? Similarly, I talked with a friend of mine who is working to learn software engineering, and I told him that I very much enjoyed Vue and found it to be "the most fun" out of the frameworks in which I've written production code: KnockoutJS, AngularJS, Angular (2+), React, Vue, and Ember.  He asked me what makes it the most fun.  I could think of a few things that gave me that impression and gave a passable answer (dynamic attributes, terse syntax, v-if and v-else in the template, etc.)...

I'm in Wichita now for Thanksgiving with my whole family in the car.  The whole 3.5-hour drive--with 8 of us in the car--as well as the large Thanksgiving dinner and hangout time afterward have all been delightful.  The kids are consistently kind and considerate to each other and express sweetness and joy throughout the day.   My wonderful wife is such an enormous blessing to me.  My heart is full of love and gratitude.  Christine is the best wife and mother I know, and it just floors me to think that I get her all to myself.  How in the world did i ever get this lucky?

 A Canadian doctor named Dr. Charles Hoffe recently said "Covid-19 seems to cause people to lose three senses.  They lose their sense of smell, their sense of taste, and they lose their common sense." This doctor sent a private letter to his superiors sharing with him the actual side effects that his own patients experienced after receiving the COVID shot.  The side effects are concerning for sure, but more concerning was the reaction from the superiors.   Dr. Hoffe's medical board threatened to take away his license for sharing plain, observable facts even without giving his own commentary on them.  They were concerned that sharing such first-hand information would lead to "vaccine hesitancy" (their words). This kind of "You can't handle the truth!" attitude makes it difficult for me to trust the things we're shown about the COVID shot.   When i try to look up basic factual information like reported deaths in order to make an informed decision...

 One of the things I love most about Software Development as a career is the ability to be in the mode of continually learning. I love being able to take on a task that will involve new challenges and then settle into the work of figuring them out one-by-one.   I also take a great deal of satisfaction (perhaps even too much satisfaction) from writing beautiful code.  TypeScript is one of my favorite ways to do that because there are inherently many new ways to improve existing code with strong typing. But i also find myself with a nagging feeling that I'm doing too much.  That all the additional typing isn't helping people very much and the additional time it takes to roll out new features will never be sufficiently compensated by the faster problem-solving or editor awareness.   I have certainly seen many benefits of course.  But it's hard to quantify the unseen: what features would've already been written by now had I or other devs not bothered ...

 Several years ago a friend of mine went through a divorce. The circumstances were common I suppose but they really caught me off guard because I had spent many hours with this friend and had no idea he and his wife were unhappy.  It was sad for me to realize that our conversations were all superficial enough that somethings like that wouldn’t even come up.  So I’ve started trying to intentionally deepen my friendships. I’m trying to set regular remote lunches and dare to ask about personal struggles and things I can pray for. It’s uncomfortable at times. But I want to be there to help if/when another friend finds himself in a similarly serious hardship.  We’ll see how this goes. 

We are coming out of a 14-day quarantine at our house. 2 weeks ago, Christine was exposed to a friend of ours who had the virus COVID-19. She tested positive so the whole family needed to quarantine ourselves for a couple weeks. Honestly, I think we all expected that most or maybe all of us would catch the virus. But surprisingly, nobody else caught it.  For Christine, the virus manifested itself with many uncomfortable symptoms such as fatigue and nausea. Thankfully, she never ran a fever. The most distinctive symptom was her loss of smell and taste. At one point, she actually bought some celery to eat because she could not taste any of the delicious food anyway. We are all very thankful that this was overall a pretty mild experience. I am amazed that nobody else in the family caught the virus as far as we know.  But more significantly, I am grateful to God that I am in a family that enjoys each other's company so much. This was not a rough time. It's hard to even say that it...

Hard to believe it's been over 6 months since my last blog post. Since I last posted, the world has experienced one of the most fundamentally impactful events of our lifetime: the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic.  A highly contagious virus has spread all over the earth and this has led most world leaders to mandate a quarantine. The stock market has taken a dive and many people lost their jobs, including me.  I was a contractor at VMLY&R, and many of the contracts dried up, leaving me without a job.  But by God's grace, I actually got a job immediately afterward with Success Vision Express. So that's what i'm up to now.  I'm working full-time as an employee with Success Vision Express, and I'm so blessed to have this work.  I'm building an e-commerce website with my brother David using Ruby on Rails and Vue.js. Meanwhile, life has changed a little bit for us.  I personally love working from home 5 days per week and spending evenings with my lovi...

For the last 6 years or so, I've considered myself primarily an Angular Developer.  First AngularJS, and then made the switch to Angular (version 2+), and have really appreciated all of its valuable uses for frontend webapps. In my new job with VMLY&R, I've needed to make the switch to React-Native framework.  I thought it would more complicated than it's been so far.  I thought i would have a harder time understanding it and a harder time liking it. Actually, so far, I've enjoyed it immensely.  And in many ways, it feels more natural to me than Angular.  Certainly the ramp up time is nothing compared to the time I spent ramping up from AngularJS to Angular. React is a genuine joy to use.  I love how much it uses the latest JavaScript ES6 syntax and how the components feel like a very natural extension of JavaScript and a beautiful blending with existing HTML components. I am not a big fan of Facebook, but I am very grateful to the Facebook team...

I started a new job last Friday.  At this time last month, I didn't have any interest in leaving the amazing job and fantastic coworkers I had at the NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) where I had worked for a little over three years. But I was given an excellent offer to work as a Senior Frontend Developer for an outstanding company called VMLY&R that handles advertising for dozens of Fortune 500 companies such as Ford, Wendy's, and Pepsi.  I felt this would be a great move for my career, my family, and my personal growth. I'll be working primarily with React (a JavaScript UI library) on the frontend and Node (server-side JavaScript) on the backend.  I had only experimented with React prior to this, but I always really enjoyed it, and can see a lot of excellent potential in it.  I've only had a day of work so far, but this afternoon, I'm getting on a plane to fly to Portland, Oregon to meet with the client (NWEA) who is hiri...

Last week, Christine and I were in Philadelphia, PA for a convention.  And for whatever reason, we decided to eat at the McDonald's across the street from the convention center.  There were so many poor quality little things about this fast food experience that it became comical to think through them all.  I'll list a few here: The floors were very sticky. No tables were clean.  Christine ended up cleaning a table herself with the cleaning fluid that was on the counter. One of the two soda machines was completely boarded up. There was no ice in the ice machine on the other soda machine. I asked for more ice, and the lady on break said "You have to wait.  I'm the one who gets the ice, but i'm on break now, so you have to wait." I asked over the counter for more ice, and they just told each other, but nobody even attempted to remedy the situation. So I waited for ice, and when the lady on break got it (after her break was done), she just set the bucket...

Have you ever felt that your life was too good?  Too easy?  Too much fun?  Too many things to be grateful for and not enough conflict? That's me sometimes. In some sense, that's me right now. I listened to a podcast today that raised some serious doubts in my mind about the likelihood that our country would remain mostly free--as i feel it is right now.  This made me sad to think about.  But I also found myself faced with the realization that this is not really my burden to carry anymore than the plight of billions of less-free people all over the world is my personal burden to carry.  My life is so unbelievably good right now, that at times I feel guilty about it all.  Should I just enjoy my life or do I owe a debt of misery or something in solidarity with all the people who are truly hurting right now? I'm not really sure what good that does though.  Things are great where I live.  My family, my job, my health... it's all wonder...

I am very excited for my little sister Mindy! About 15 months ago, Mindy started dating a wonderful man named Brice Belden.  Last Sunday, on her birthday, after a production of White Christmas that Mindy directed and choreographed, Brice proposed to her onstage in glorious, lavish fashion in front of a crowd of her best friends and biggest fans. It was one of the finest proposals I've ever seen.  I'm so proud of Brice for putting on such a big display for Mindy and giving her an amazing story that she can tell her friends and children for decades to come. And more importantly, Brice loves Mindy deeply and is immensely supportive of her and her dreams.  I have prayed for years for Mindy to find someone great like him.  We are thrilled to welcome Brice to our family.

When I wrote Code for Teens , I set out to teach programming concepts in a way that was accessible to anyone, regardless of religion. Those of you who have read it know there aren't any religious messages in the book.  Still, I was recently turned down by a group of educators known as Secular, Eclectic, Academic Homeschoolers (SEAH) solely for having two paragraphs that reference a church. SEAH was excited to promote my book on their website until they found two short paragraphs that mention a church (no reference to the faith of this church in the book at all--just a mention of it).  SEAH asked me to rewrite this portion. I told them that I did not control the published book anymore (the publishers do), but I could make an insert that replaces the "church" with "summer camp".  So I rewrote those two paragraphs and submitted them as an addendum that they could distribute with the book or use any other way they wanted. Apparently, this wasn't enough. ...

 A close friend of mine was recently wronged in a terrible way by a scoundrel of a man and then afterward by our own legal system. I'll speak with vagaries to protect the identities, but here's the gist.  My friend was taken advantage of by a pathological liar.  In order to seek justice, my friend took him to court.  The liar was caught committing perjury over a dozen times (literally) while on the stand , and was forced to admit many of his lies in open court, along with having broken contracts and lied to cover his tracks. It seemed like an obvious, cut-and-dried case to prove and vote in favor of my friend.  But to everyone's astonishment, the jury sided with the liar.  And now my friend is stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of legal fees (including paying for the shyster's legal fees). It is such a blatant miscarriage of justice, that it almost makes me sick.  How did 8 members of a jury come to such a conclusion?  Did an...

Around this time last month, I was kind of excited about the prospect of writing the 2nd volume of Code for Teens.  Then I received the sales report from my publishing company.  Sales are so low, they are almost non-existent.  They tell me that things should pick up, and they are confident that we will do many more sales this year.  But I can't help but think to myself "Did they actually anticipate sales numbers that were really this low in the first three months?"  Surely not.  I'm not sure what to make of it all.  I expected that people reading and enjoying the book would cause increased exposure and attention, but it seems like the book is only dropping rapidly in the Amazon ranking despite having an average of 5 stars basically 100% positive feedback from all of the readers. It's an interesting age we live in where it's surprisingly easy to write a book and get it available for sale, but it's so hard for the book to receive any attention--likel...

I started working on Volume 2 of my Code for Teens series!  This time, I'm making it a point to write at least half a page every time I get on the bus to or from work and also write several pages every weekend. At times I wonder if all of this will be worth the time and effort.  I very well may end up losing money on this book.  I hope to sell enough copies to at least get my financial investment back, but there are no guarantees.  Volume 1 has been extremely well-received among people who've read it, but it's been a real challenge to get noticed.  Volume 2 adds some additional time pressure with it as I'm trying to have everything completed in time to take both books to the two large education conventions this year. One of the things that keeps me going, however, is knowing that my life is composed of all the things I do with it.  I may lose money on the book.  I may have been financially better off not writing a book at all.  But at the end ...

I've been a software engineer for about 13 years or so.  For the last 4 years, I've been at a senior level at the companies where I've worked.  But I came to realize something over the last few months: I have a tendency to seek out the easiest ways to learn new things.  Case in point: when it came to learning new technologies, many of my colleagues tended to read many pages of official documentation while I tended to ignore the documentation and look for videos or targeted googling to learn.  This works fine much of the time, so I still learn it.  But the point is that I was almost unable to learn from the actual documentation.  I recognized that there was a bit of a hole in my skillset as a senior developer, and it was up to me to fill it. So over the last couple weeks, i challenged myself to dig deep in the official documentation for the technologies I used at work.  When something challenged me, I tried going first to the official docs to see if...

My sister Mindy has a knack for making and retaining friendships.  Not only is she very friendly, but she puts a lot of time, thought and effort into keeping those friendships vibrant and active. I, on the other hand, tend to be much more task-oriented than relationship-oriented.  At any given time, I am keenly aware of a myriad of tasks that I intend to accomplish.  I appreciate the value of friends, but if left to my own devices, I will rarely seek out times to enrich friendships as these don't help me to check off items on my immediate to-do list. My wife Christine has even more of an appreciation for good friendships than I do, but she is similarly unlikely to organize get-togethers or plan lunches with friends.  She is, however, a great cook and very willing to have people over to our house.  This opens up a unique opportunity for us to invite people over on a regular basis. A few years ago, we started inviting a couple we like to come over to our hou...

Last August, I started writing this book, and Christine agreed to be my illustrator.  Well just last month, we got our first shipment of the books, and they look fantastic! www.CodeForTeens.com The last two weekends, Christine and I attended the Midwest Parent Educators Homeschool Conference and the Teaching Parents Association Homeschool Convention as exhibitors peddling our new book Code for Teens .  It's so exciting to me that people are reading this book, enjoying it, and learning how to code! Selling books at the homeschool conventions was a new experience for both Christine and me.  I do not consider myself to be much of a salesman, but these books sold very well, and it was a lot of fun to see how well people responded to it.  We sold way more than our goal of book copies, and there are many more opportunities coming up on the horizon. Technically, the book isn't available for sale yet.  Our publisher is still looking to make a concerted mark...

About two years ago (February 7, 2016), on the day of the Super Bowl, my brother Davey (who lives in Iowa) and I decided on a whim to meet up together, watch the Super Bowl and play some board games.  We chose a city that was halfway between the two of us, and we went to a comfortable motel for all of our gaming.  It was such a fun day.  One of the most enjoyable Super Bowl days I've ever experienced. On most of the way home, he and I talked on the phone and brainstormed about how we might improve on this experience and spread it to many of our other friends.  That's when we developed the idea of a Guys' Board Game Retreat. We invited many guys in our circle of influence to drive down to Bethany and hang out for a day and a half of board games.  Everyone pays a small fee, and we use that to cover bedrooms, game room, meals, gas, and lots of delicious snacks.  We have done 4 of these board game retreats (with a 5th one coming up next month), and they are...