Anarchist Engineer aka Jeremy Darling
Yep, that's me at 2:00AM, after 16 hours of drywall, mudding, taping, sanding, texturing, priming, and painting in our "new" (at least at that time) master suite. I sent my wife away for the weekend and decided that she should come home to a complete retreat.
If I don't look happy that's because I thought I'd be done and asleep by then. Instead there were continuous interruptions and I was behind, way behind. I easily could have just hung it up and had an almost finished product when my wife came home, but that isn't my style. I finish things, I finish them as close to on time as I can. So, instead, I worked through the night and by 10:00AM I had a complete master suite ready for her to come home and do some relaxing in. Of course, she didn't show up till almost 5:00PM (well better safe than sorry).
You see, we have 4 wonderful kids (3 boys and the youngest a girl), we homeschool, and we are very active in our children's lives. This means that 90% of my wifes waking hours are taking care of kids, teaching, cooking, cleaning, running around to activities, and all the wonderful things that go along with parenting. I get the wonderful escape of work.
Ok, that's enough about the home life, let's take a little about this site.
I started software development in the early 80's and I wanted this site to be a throw back to the glory days on my TRS-80 and its soothing green on black terminal look. You see, back then, there was no Internet, and being a tech head wasn't cool. In fact, being a tech head made you a pariah and most likely to get assaulted at every opportunity.
That didn't matter, the hum of the monitor and scratching of the disk drive was more than I could stand.
I had friends with Commodore's, Apple's, and some even had 8080's (later on). We would spend hours if not days reading through magazines, manuals, and books. With some reading code, some typing, and some praying that the runtime gods looked favorably upon us.
There was no feedback mechanic to tell you you got it wrong back then. You typed for days, then entered the "run" command, and generally, were then "thanked" with a "Syntax Exception" error. No line numbers, no clue as to what was wrong, just "It's broke, fix it." Today they would come up with some cutesy buzz word bingo title like "Pair Programming" to describe our activities, then it was just what you did.
Yep, those were the good old days, and I, for one, miss it. Not because I miss being slapped around by a runtime (yes folks, QBasic was a runtime, not a compiler), but because I miss there not being a focus on "This is the right term." We had to focus on what we were doing, learn something, and work together.
You didn't sit down ahead of time and say "Ok, your the librarian, your the developer, your the project manager, etc, etc, etc..." You didn't spend half your life in meetings talking about things that would lead to meetings. You didn't spend another quarter entering your tasks, milestones, and notes about what you were going to do. No, we just self organized and got shit done.
Later in life I got interested in electronics. I found myself doing the same thing I did with development, grabbing stuff from a Radio Shack shelf (yeah that was a big thing back then), going home spreading it out on the table, and putting something together.
This would lead me to go to vocational school for Digital Engineering and graduating top of my class. Of course, no one hires people with a Certificate of Completion from a Vocational School. So I worked in the only area of tech that I could "Programming".
This is how I work, I self organize and get shit done. I don't focus on planning it out early on, I grab random parts, chuck them together, come up with a prototype and then if its any good I clean it up. 90% of the time I put it out in the "Open Source" world for others to use or learn from. If its good, people use it, if its bad, it sits there as a reminder that I got it wrong.
This is the reason that I (finally) chose the moniker Anarchist Engineer. I prefer Anarchist "teamwork", I prefer to learn from mistakes, not from a classroom, and I prefer not to focus in on "it can't be done" instead I'm the guy who will re-invent the wheel to learn something new.
So, that's a little about me,
- Anarchist Engineer