This Site
Tech CraftWork is a blog about technical craftsmanship and software engineering practices. Emphasis on the craftsmanship and engineering practices as opposed to programming how-to’s; I see a ton of coverage online for the latter, but very little for the former.
I feel that there are so many people entering the software field and all of the focus is just on showing them to “code” instead of teaching them to be good “software engineers” that it grows ever more increasingly difficult to find solid engineers to work with. I am hoping to help change that and build a community around improving that not only for software engineers, but also for system administrators, network ops, dev ops, database administrators, data scientists, site reliability engineers, cloud engineers, and any other technical workers involved in the software development industry.
Me
I first became a professional software developer during the summer of 1999 for the Capital Engineering department at the manufacturing plant where my father worked at the time.
My individual-contributor years have involved being a programmer at the aforementioned manufacturing plant, an intern at a start-up, an integration engineer, a tools engineer, and a platform engineer across the industrial manufacturing, defense contracting, security, user-provisioning, health product sales analysis, population wellness, and payment processing fields. My career was facilitated by my education, both a BS and MS of Computer Science, from an engineering school; Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Over my years of education and experience, I have used many different languages, libraries, software, and design patterns; but I have ultimately become tool-agnostic because, with the amount of solutions available these days, there are no good excuses for not picking the best tool for each job. The choice of tools for the project should be treated as a foundational piece of the project design and should not be treated any other way. Such mentalities are learned over many years of experience and what I aim to provide instant access to through my articles here.
In 2014, I was fortunate enough to shift over to the leadership track and have been running on that ever since. From an engineer’s perspective, running on that track has involved stuff like more meetings, becoming a technical architect, being the hiring manager, approving PTO, and writing performance reviews; however, it has also involved stuff like process management, educating engineers, organizing off-sites, analyzing incentives/motives, and mitigating the negative effects of the Russo-Ukrainian war on a multinational distributed team. At some point, I will write an article specifically about that last one.
These days, I have been running on the executive section of the leadership track. I also actively code the web app for my board gaming club. I am an avid follower of the WRC (World Rally Championship), am highly interested in digital currencies (AKA “cryptocurrencies”), and am growing fruit in my garden.