A Brief Intro

This is the first post to this blog.  I started this blog February 2022 while working at iRobot.  I'd just finished creating and teaching a technical training program and figured some of those insights should be available more widely.  At first I considered just blogging internally to iRobot, but I think it is a greater net good to blog publicly.  My hope for doing this publicly is that it accomplishes three goals I couldn't with an internal blog

1. Makes this material available to more people
2. Allows a wider range of people to comment, which will increase the value for my iRobot co-workers
3. Allows me to collaborate with other people, who may not be at iRobot

I'll use this blog for non-technical discussions.  So, for example I won't discuss the merits or demerits of design patterns here.  However, discussing how design patterns are discussed is fair game.  For example "prefer composition" is in my opinion a bad way to give that advice.   Consider the merits of composition and inheritance is better advice, and even better is being more specific.

If your interested in a who I am, you can find me on LinkedIn.  Note, I don't generally connect with people I don't know so email me first if you really want to connect.  A nice short version is I've done a lot of different things, almost all of them programming.  Insurance company, done that, political consulting and Gerrymandering check  Automotive work, yup and I even got/had to drive my own tests.  In Massachusetts I've worked on Tools, and Industrial controls.  My current gig is working on robots.  

I had my first professional programming experience writing a program to use gradient descent to solve a 5th order polynomial for my Dad (in basic on a color computer) back around 1980.  

If this seriously predates your experience, congratulations things are way easier these days.   If you're curious to the right of the computer is a tape recorder which gave you about 660kB of storage which was more than you needed on a machines with 16kB of RAM.  

If your thinking that sounds awful, you aren't wrong by today's standards.  However, in it's day as an alternative to a $500 floppy disk drive an $80 tape recorder was pretty awesome. Also, it was a great way to learn you had to pretty much roll everything yourself.

Fun fact, I felt bad about brute forcing the solution to that quintic polynominal.   Later in grad school Dan Koditschek  professor pointed out that that was probably the only way to go Quintic function - Wikipedia.  Another nice thing is today, you wouldn't need to pay to have that programmed you'd just type it into Wolfram Alpha.