Who the hell are you?

I’m Matt Kline, a software engineer living in the Seattle area, currently employed by Fluke Networks, and a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in computer sciences and computer engineering.

I got pulled into the wonderful world of software through FIRST Robotics, an amazing international program that challenges high school teams each year to build a robot in six weeks from a kit of parts and a programmable controller. Since then I’ve bounced around a bunch of internships and opportunities before landing where I am today, writing a smorgasbord of software in C, C++, C#, VB.NET, Java, and most recently, D. I’m always eager to learn new things, but the work I really enjoy doing is usually systems or performance-driven, application-level stuff.

Why does the world need another programming blog?

It probably doesn’t.

Pearls Before Swine on blogging

I’ve played with the idea of starting one of my own blog for a long time, but it’s 2014 and the internet is filled with so many programming blogs that it’s like throwing messages in bottles out into a churning sea of messages in bottles. I’ll give it a shot, though. Why?

  1. Writing is important. As many others such as Jeff Atwood have pointed out, you can be the smartest guy in the world, but if you can’t convince other humans you have a decent idea, it’s all for naught. Even if this thing has a readership of zero or a few friends for quite a while, writing on a regular basis certainly can’t hurt.

  2. I’m passionate about software. There’s something almost sacred about it. Software and computer engineers have touched every single facet of the modern world. In the last 60 years we’ve gone from primitive, hulking machines to ubiquitous, tiny computers - they’re on your laptop or tablet’s motherboard, in your phones, your car, your kitchen, your laundry room. Everywhere. There’s something breathtaking about how some of the most complicated devices ever made by mankind all come together, and they just work. Brilliant new strides are made every day, standing atop decades of brilliance. Walking around a place like the Living Computer Museum feels like visiting a shrine to human progress. Of course there’s a dark side, but there’s something incredible about being able to create entire worlds with your thoughts. You can build something awe-inspiring with nothing but an idea, and if you need tools to build it, you make tools with your tools. I hope to capture this passion in my writing.

This site looks a bit sparse.

This is my first foray into web stuff, and in order to get the ball rolling, I wanted as little development work as possible between me and publishing content. To that end, I went with GitHub Pages and Jekyll. I plan on sprucing it up at some point, with the first order of business being to set up some comments system. On the other hand, simple is good.

So what will you talk about?

The world of software is a massive and captivating one - there’s always something interesting going on. It’s also a very opinionated one, and being a chronically opinionated individual, I have plenty to say. This blog will be about software and the people that surround it - software education, the software industry, what we do and why we do it.

Here goes nothing.

Addendum:

I’ve added comments using Disqus, which I chose just because it’s absurdly simple to embed. Feel free to suggest alternatives.