Hello, EHLO, CHLO, SYN, ANSam, and thanks for dialing into my site. There is a whole world of technical and design stories out there. I've listed a few of mine here.
I'm Colin, software engineer and former network operator. I've worked across the board, from rich web apps (Google Music), data processing (200+ million tweets using Luigi), to running a 1Gbps residential ISP, to performance tuning (340% speedup for scientific tool PCat-DNest).
I'm interested in performance engineering, security, network transport protocols, embedded linux, running, skiing/snowboarding, electronic music, VR, truth and privacy in the hyper-connected age, and the web through the decades.
I prescribe to the school of deep understanding and the school of doing thorough work. We stand on the shoulders of network protocols, libraries, languages, even hardware. Knowing the mechanisms below the abstractions allows for deeper work, better performance, and debugging. Learning how and why the giants are implemented the way they are gives great insight, helps improve your own engineering.
Hand in hand with deep understanding, I believe in doing thorough work. Many solutions and libraries available today are half-assed. Others fail to do hard thinking about their abstractions and end up a frustrating, disjoint mess of classes. I believe in being thorough, having a vision, acting deliberately, turning over most every stone, knowing where to draw the lines between components, knowing the goals and anti-goals, avoiding tunnel vision, and placing high emphasis on verification.
As the saying goes, if it's worth doing, then it's worth half-assing!
... wait, no, that's not quite right.