Hi, I’m Mark and welcome to my blog where I write about all things technology related.

I’ve been married to a wonderful woman going on thirty-five years. We have one daughter who is married, with one child, our granddaughter. We live in the USA in Columbus, Ohio.

I came of age in the personal computer era of the late 1970’s and early 80s. My first computer class was a Cassette Basic (CBasic) course on a TRS-80 Model 1 during my sophomore year of high school in 1982. If I recall, it had about 8Kb of memory and a magnetic cassette deck for storage.

During college I worked on operating systems like the IBM System 360/370, IBM System 34/36, and Vax VMS. Studies included mostly dead languages such as Cobol, RPG, PL/1, Assembler 360, Lisp and SQL. My first experience with a relational database was Oracle on Vax VMS in 1986, a full forty years ago now! I’ve since worked with Microsoft SQL, DB2, DB400, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and various No SQL databases.

My first personal operating system was MS-DOS, and soon after, Novell Netware entered the picture. I didn’t find Linux until the mid 1990’s about the time Windows NT was released. A bif of Slackware puttering before moving on to RedHat. Today I drive an Ubuntu workstation along side a Windows laptop with WSL, and an OS X Mac Mini. My cloud infrastructure is hosted virtual machines running Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi’s running Raspbian with Docker containers.

I jumped on the Java language wagon during the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Then I found the dynamic programming languages in about 2010. I’ve primarily focused on these for the last decade and a half. Lots of Ruby on Rails. a smattering of Python, a touch of PHP, a whole lot of JavaScript, and a wee bit of Perl.

Polymorphism and Metaprogramming were enlightening concepts. They evolved the need for Test Driven Development. This fostered the Behavioral/Spec driven development movement. Today this becomes more important than ever. The BDD and Spec information are necessary context. The power of AI goes unharnessed with out the skills to articulate this context to the software agents. We should view these AI systems as the evolution that they are, rather than revolutionary. We’ll be putting a whole lot more people to work using AI than we will without it.