The Blair Hippo Project: Geekery

Where Pete Reveals How He Pays His Half of the Bills

08/11/04: Hello, World

I'm a programmer -- a software engineer, actually, but "programmer" sounds more accessible, so we'll roll with that.

These days, I'm doing mostly Perl/CGI work (Footnote -- Perl) for a client in Cincinatti. Prior to that, I spent the better part of three years doing web applications in Java; did some good work, too.

I dig both languages, Perl and Java. I know they both have their flaws, but they both have their uses. I've always (Footnote -- Always?) loved Perl for use as a text processor, and have in the past year and a half come to appreciate how useful it can be for larger projects that can't afford to use a lot of resources on an application server or something similar. On the other hand, Java is a damn fine large-project heavy-lifting language, standardized and well-documented. And, of course, both have a thriving open source community behind them and neither has anything to do with Microsoft. (Footnote -- Microsoft) Boo-ya.

I've been dinking around with the web for almost as long as there's been a web. (Footnote -- Web) That's one of the reasons I'm doing this page, in fact; I'd like to have a little sandbox to play in, to test out ideas and fool around with some technologies. Like my little footnote thingies, (Footnote -- Thingy) for example; I had some ideas for doing something like this, to take advantage of the technology and not just pretend that a web page should behave like a sheet of paper. I also figure this can be a little showcase I can point to and say "See! That's what my web pages look like!" And I have some ideas for running this site that would require a bit of Perl/CGI and the MySQL database lurking on this server; we'll see how much time I wanna spend on it.

I enjoy programming; to me, it's another kind of creative act. It's like playing with Legos, or building sandcastles; you have an image of how something can work, and you try to make that image become reality. For me it's a lot like writing, with the difference that there's a definitive right and wrong answer. There's no equivalent to a compiler (Footnote -- Compiler) in writing; everything is, on some level, a matter of opinion. Bitch up the syntax in a Perl script, and it's very definitely not a matter of opinion; your code is broken. Better fix it.