Not Your Language
About Me
I’m John Darrington. You can find me on LinkedIn and Github. You can learn about who I am and what I care about here – on my personal site.
First, good luck trying to write a short autobiography. I remember how long I spent on my LinkedIn summary section – trying to get the wording just right and not sound like an extremely arrogant individual.
Who’s clicking through to this fancy “About Me” page anyways? Are you a recruiter? A dear friend? My mother doing her best to support me in every little thing I might do? I have no idea- and I have no idea what you’re most interested in.
So I’ve decided that I’ll just tell you what I’m most interested in and we’ll see where we are after that.
Software Engineering
“John this is a massive category! You could mean anything from writing code for NASA to helping manage a large company’s infrastructure!” – My editor probably.
I think it’s worth mentioning this however. The entire realm of software engineering is fascinating and something I’m passionate about exploring. While I do have a couple of areas in which I have a laser focus, they don’t take away from my desire to learn everything I can.
Recently I’ve come off an Erlang/Elixir kick; experimenting with AI management of SMS communications. Granted as soon as I started heavily working in that area Twilio came out with Twilio Autopilot. Their sales pitch reads almost exactly like my original design notes. So yeah, that was fun.
I do have a special place in my heart for functional programming. I love what little I’ve done with Lisp and I lament that I haven’t been able to use it more frequently. That and my “(” and “)” keys have basically been worn out.
Space
Oh man, I don’t even know where to start on this one. I think space exploration and the discoveries that come because of it will become the most significant things to happen to the human race.
I’ve been involved in a few NASA events; even being invited as a member of the press to a test firing of the largest rocket booster ever constructed. I’ve been lucky enough to meet and talk to multiple astronauts – and to talk to the head of NASA.
Not to mention I get to build pretty cool things with my son, like this Lego rocket. He’s cute, not quite as cute as me though.
If you’ve made it down here – wow. You must really like learning about some random guy from the internet. If you’ve made it down here and want more maybe I’ll add some more bits as time goes on. Misc
Here are a couple of links to configuration files for a couple tools I use. They might not be the fanciest, but I’ve built them up over the last couple of years and have been happy with the results.