Life Story

Hello. I'm Brian. I was born and grew up in the US, and moved to Canada in 2010.

Programming Life Story

I got my BS in CS from the University of Pittsburgh. I've been a full-stack developer for about 20 years.

I grew up using Perl, and survived. Nowadays I mostly use Ruby (for fun) and Javascript (for work), and I gravitate toward dynamic languages, generally speaking. Although Python rubs me the wrong way (sorry). I can appreciate a good static language now and then, and I've made stuff in C# and Go. I also write a lot of SQL, and I think it gets a bad rap.

Clojure was my obsession for a quite some time and I still find myself writing Lispy code in whatever language I'm using. I wrote a book about Clojure a while ago.

I'll take Vim over Emacs and, either over VS Code. I'll take MacOS over Linux (it's close) and anything over Windows (not close).

I love language, both programming and human. I love parsing text!

Hobbies

❥ Fountain Pens

I collect fountain pens. As someone immersed in the digital world all day every day, I enjoy the opportunity to disconnect and become analog for a while. I like to journal, write to pen pals, practice Japanese, and do bad calligraphy with my pens, but I also collect them just to collect them.

My most precious is a Long-Piccolo Midori-Tamenuri from Nakaya, which took over a year to make and should outlast my lifetime. I like Pelikans a lot, mostly vintage ones.

❥ Video Games

This may be shocking, but I play video games. 😱 I like Metroidvania-style platformers, turn-based retro RPGs, and Dark Souls. ☀️

❥ Music

I like almost all music, except country. Lately I'm into metal. 🤘 My favourite bands right now include Battle Beast, Power Wolf, and Eisbrecher. I play guitar (badly) and piano (badly).

❥ Pixel Art

I think pixel art is a pretty cool artform. Some of that is nostalgia, but modern pixel art has grown far beyond the stuff that used to be cobbled together for old video games, into something that's worthwhile in its own right.