HELLO WORLD (Introductions thread!)

[asgartech]

I’m a long-haired metalhead from New York who didn’t get his own computer until he was 18 and got into coding by writing batch files with a third-hand copy of DOS for Dummies as a guide.

I got into tech because it paid better than cleaning toilets at a supermarket. When I got exposed to Unix in college, it was almost a religious experience, and I’ve been running Unix-like operating systems on personal equipment ever since, but I’m a Windows developer for my sins.

As a developer I’m a bit like Gregory House, but without the drug habit, racism, and misogyny. My strengths lie in implementation, debugging, and bombarding business analysts and sometimes clients with questions until they finally reveal their true requirements.

After all, everybody lies.

[matgarland]

Hey Devtalk,

Stoked to find a new platform in the dev space. Hoping to be active here from now on. Congratulations on the new platform. I’m just finding my way about and loving it at the moment.keep up the great work

[patrickdm]

Hello I’m Patrick from Italy. 52 y.o. (tomorrow!). Former molecular biologist, with the passion for programming since my beloved ZX81 1k . In the last 10 years I’ve been a freelance backend and mobile developer (often full stack in this context), mostly with Rails (and that little gem of Sinatra) and Titanium (js cross-platform framework), and the last three years I moved to Elixir/Phoenix with renewed gratifications. Lately I’ve been playing around with Dart/Flutter quite enjoying the experience.
In the past I’ve developed intranet and web applications in ASP (hey, it was 20 y. ago) and PHP. Used Perl, R and Ruby for biodata analysis and glue-scripting. From time to time I enjoy hacking with Supercollider, lot of fun and weird noises (apart once when I coded a quite complex midi sequencer, whose code now look so alien to me). I’m a senior Aikidoka, a beginner piano player, and developed a recent insane passion for table tennis. On top of the stack I’ve started to learn and use Rust to build little bioinformatics CLI programs for a friend’s biotech startup. I arrived here from Elixir forum thanks to the awesome work of Aston and his collaborators!
Glad to see friendly avatars and new ones too.
Greetings from Milano, Italy, to everyone.

[Josh]

Hello from California. I mostly use JavaScript/TypeScript at the moment but am trying to learn more Elixir and Rust (especially for WebAssembly).

[AstonJ]

Hello everyone - it’s great to see you all here

Thanks @matgarland - let us know if you get stuck with anything

Happy Birthday @patrickdm - I hope you have a lovely birthday and thank you for the kind words <3

[sebastian]

Hi everyone, my name is Sebastian – great to be part of this community!

I am originally from Norway, but currently live in Germany. My interests seem to shift constantly. I like doing backend work, but from do enjoy doing front-end work from time to time too. I used to love Ruby, then loved Erlang, before falling in love with ocaml. I nearly fell in love with Haskell too, but then decided I prefer F#. Elixir is wonderful too, of course.

My day job is as CTO at Aircloak, but I try to find time for side projects too. The latest one being the WaterCooler, a slack bot for remote teams.

Last year I learnt to do pottery and learnt to paraglide. Surprisingly I found pottery to be more exciting.

Looking forward to getting to know you better!

[davearonson]

Hi everybody! Some of you already know me from the Elixir Forum, where I was quite active a few years ago and then kinda drifted away.

These days I’m a “software development consultant”. That means that not only do I crank out code, but I advise others how to do it better, from mentoring junior devs to advising department heads and such on their development processes, tools, and so on. More details at https://www.Codosaur.us/.

For the past few years I’ve also been speaking at conferences, from Hawai’i to Moldova and trying for further afield, mainly on mutation testing and ACRUMEN, my new simple (simplistic?) definition of software quality.

Languages: for the past several years, I’ve mainly worked in Ruby (my favorite); before that, decades of mainly C. Also bits here and there of SQL, Python, JavaScript, ActionScript, Perl, Java, C++, Objective-C, Pascal, LISP, FORTRAN, REXX, BASIC, assorted assemblers, shell script, and many others. I learned COBOL, SNOBOL, APL, and others in school, Way Back When (also where I learned Pascal, FORTRAN, and some assemblers), and taught myself the rest of the above, plus Elixir and the very basics of Scala.

Systems: prefer Mac, will settle for Linux (or other Unixoids), have avoided Windows since XP days, and used lots of others most devs haven’t heard of.

[gris]

Hello, everyone.

My name is João Gris. I work as a solutions engineer for VTEX (a commerce platform). My job consists mainly of providing software development consulting for strategic partners of the company, creating tools to improve developer experience, create content and deliver developer training. Sometimes I help sales people when the sales process becomes too technical.

My main goals as a programmer now are to invest more in personal projects and open-source.

Hope to have great discussions here!

[robrain]

Hi there. 50 year old programmer from the UK, currently in the process of moving to Canada (Whistler in particular). After 20 years as an admin programmer/manager at a minor University, I spread my wings into the hedge fund world, then into a couple of Canadian startups. I’ve programmed in many of the popular languages of the 90s and 2000s, but I now focus exclusively on Elixir, often coupled with Phoenix or Absinthe, increasingly with Commanded and LiveView.

I’m a keen cyclist (road, MTB and downhill), walker and swimmer, also a car nut (Porsche and Tesla are the uneasy bedfellows in my garage).

Looking forward to describing Covid in the past tense.

[mafinar]

Hi, Mafinar here from Toronto. Elixir Developer of three years (and loving it). GIS geek. Working at Loblaw Digital. Currently learning Rust. Worked with Python (w/Django), JavaScript (w/React, Vue , Angular etc) and Go in the past. Big fan of Elixir and Clojure.

Love this forum and the nice people out here. Thank you for being here!

[fabiomux]

Hi everyone,

I am Fabio from Italy, I started programming 26 years ago, moving the first steps with Turbo Pascal and DOS scripts. During these years I studied many other languages, from Assembler to C, C++, Visual Basic, PHP, Javascript, Ruby, … and experienced several frameworks/RAD for work or personal projects (Drupal, Delphi, Sinatra, Ionic,…).
I know about this forum because of @AstonJ post at Metaruby where I was registered and enjoyed the community there.
What I aim to do is learning Dart/Flutter and setup some personal projects in Rails.
My other interests are about woodworking and photography.

[fabiomux]

Hi @ohm this is my experience with Bullet Journal:
I started at January because I needed to reorganize many aspect of my activities, what I learnt is that every journal is personal but you can take advantage of the several schemes and methods shared.
I mainly used Youtube and the offiicial site and book wrote from Ryder Carroll, there is also a community but I didn’t subscribed it yet. He explains how he used that method to give more weight to the most important things in his life, applying his schemes for handle a more intentional life.
So it’s not just an agenda, but also a planner, a diary, a notebook, a tracker, useful to collect many aspect of your life.
Of course you would enjoy it as much as you go deeper with that method, but you can start with basic things like:
1 future log
2 monthly log
3 weekly/daily log
I would recommend to leave the first 2/3 pages for an index of things about the journal content, but to fill it later. I don’t use an official Bullet Journal notebook but just a cheap A5 spiral notebook with squared sheets, which is more comfortable to me.

[kamranhossain]

Hello World!
I am a Kamran Hossain, from Bangladesh. Working as a Software Engineer with mainly Python and Django. From last year I am learning Functional Programming with Elixir and Erlang. Mainly working with Phoenix Framework to but fault tolerance and real time web application. Searching for new opportunity to work full time with Elixir and Phoenix and obviously with team of some good programmers.

[ohm]

Thanks @fabiomux! I have looked at a few YouTube videos and read of a few of the schemes you mention. I might be starting soon™.

[svilen]

Hi everyone

My name is Svilen. Originally from Bulgaria, I’ve been living in London, UK, for most of my life.

I started learning HTML around the age of 10, and learning C when I was about 12. I went to a technical boarding school that focuses on microprocessor technologies and systems, and some programming (Motorola Assembly and Borland Delphi at the time). I enjoyed the programming part the most, especially for the web, so I’ve been doing web development ever since.

Currently I work with Elixir as a freelance engineer. Other than Elixir and software development, I’m also interested in startups (I studied Technology Entrepreneurship and have one unsuccessful startup behind my back), Japanese calligraphy (I hold semi-2nd dan), and Traditional Judo.

[dasdom]

Hi,

my name is Dominik. I’m an iOS developer and author from Germany. Before being an iOS developer I was a physicist.

[Anna]

Hi all!

I’m Anna from Austria and I’m still quite new to development, or so it feels (impostor syndrome anyone? )

I’m currently working mainly with PHP, but with everything going on I’d like to broaden my scope and add some other languages.

Glad I found this place!

[brentjanderson]

I’m a software engineer from Utah. TypeScript during the day, Elixir in my spare time. Once upon a time I worked on video games, ran a mobile app consultancy, shipped some of the first apps on the iOS and Android app stores, and built starship simulators.

I’ve worked at a variety of companies, mostly early- and mid-stage startups. Currently at Lambda School and loving it.

I like getting outdoors on hikes and feel super lucky to get to do the work that I do each day.

[ShowMeBillyJo]

Hello, world! I’m Billy Jo from Kansas City, MO, USA. I fell in love with computers in the late ‘80s, started batch scripting and building small HTML projects in the mid ‘90s, and I’ve been a software professional since 2001. I’ve worked on a wide variety of projects across many industries, including high-speed document scanning and OCR, healthcare backoffice, and oceanic mapping. I’m currently in the nonprofit sector, and I never want to work in for-profit again.

I’m a passionate advocate for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM fields. My daily playlist is mostly folk music and country love songs. I love all food, from french fries to escargot. (My favorite cuisine is Northern Indian, and I’ll try anything twice!) I’m an Eagle Scout, and I volunteer in my community regularly. My favorite spot is in my chair with a cat on my lap.

Happy to make your acquaintance!

[asgartech]

@Anna, I’ve been doing this for twenty years and I still don’t know what I’m doing half the time. You’ll be fine as long as you remember that everybody else fakes it too sometimes.