What Am I Doing Now?
Temporal “Now”
My three-year-old son is crazy about pigs. He also likes to type commands into the shell—mostly to watch them fail with funny messages. Combining these interests, I wrote a one-off script that prints funny scenarios about a pig. That has transformed into a tiny text game engine and a game we call Feed the Pig. The engine is simple enough that I can usually add a new scenario to the game each night in a few minutes of spare time. My son loves to see what’s new with the pig every day, and it’s good reading practice.
I’m working on a general-purpose HTTP server in Go with endpoint handlers written in shell. My pitch is that many HTTP APIs and lightly dynamic websites are mostly glue code and could be quickly and idiomatically implemented in a shell language—all that’s missing is a robust HTTP server. This approach allows authors to write only shell scripts in a task file style, invoking the server program once at startup.
Longer term, I’m following the example of Rob Pike’s Acme editor in working toward a set of tools constituting an integrating development environment—basically, the old "UNIX is my IDE" trope.
Biographical “Now”
My daughter was born in February 2025. Sleep and free time are scarce so I’m rethinking how I can contribute to this site in small yet meaningful ways.
As of , I live in Arden, NC (Asheville metro) with my wife, son, daughter, and dog.
I’m currently employed by Leica Biosystems as a Staff Software Engineer working on applications in the field of digital pathology. I was hired on .