Adventures in Changing Your Path


From Underwater Acoustics to Web Development, A Transformation

Onward! (Thinking in OO)

I heard someone once referenced as saying something to the effect that people who learned how to program in procedural methods would never make the transition to Object Oriented Programming (OOP).


Thoughts on efficiency and context within programming

The idea of efficiency has been often misunderstood, and outside of the context of available hardware, one may be led to think that all concepts pertaining to efficiency are equal. With the ideas of Big-O notation permeating our minds, one may be led to believe that efficiency is and only is Big-O. For those that need a refresher on Big-O, have a look here. Big-O, while a very important and key concept, doesn’t tell the whole story and is one of the conceptual tools available to programmers.


A Taste of HTML5 Semantics

I was hoping to have been involved with something more challenging with HTML5 by now, but honestly it’s all pretty straight-forward. So since I couldn’t find something “tricky”, let’s talk about the Semantics in HTML5. These are some really useful new markups that were compiled by the good folks at Google and some others based on the most frequently used patterns from the past. That’s always a fantastic starting point, sifting through historical data to find trends and creating emergent tools to make a little more sense of things. So, let’s get started, shall we?


My lifelong journey with computers

When I was a kid, I remember being in school and brought into a room and asked a bunch of strange and interesting questions. While I really can’t tell you exactly what the questions were, I must have answered them well. A few weeks later I and about three others in my school were set in a room. The instructor, Mr Gershbach (I honestly don’t recall the spelling, but it was something like that! I was in the second grade after all) said “Today we are going to learn about Computers”. I raised my hand and asked “What’s a Computer”? The other classmates giggled. We learned Pascal, at least I’m pretty sure it was Pascal. This was before computers were widespread, and gasp the Internet didn’t really exist in any accessible form.