My little brother got married a few weeks ago.
There were, of course, at least a dozen different people taking pictures of the festivities on their digital cameras.
Now the happy couple (and their family and friends) want to see all those photos.
When I was a kid, my family got a Franklin Ace 1000 computer. It had a green monochrome screen, and it booted directly to a DOS prompt (completely compatible with the Apple ][+ platform). It had a few games, too. Off the top of my head, I remember a PacMan clone, Lode Runner, Lemonade Stand (which is surely the root of all my lifelong entrepreneurial ambitions), Montezuma’s Revenge, Space Invaders, and a weird game called Dung Beetles.
Also: Zork
My mom is one of the greatest people ever.
So when she tells me about one of her software ideas, I listen.
In my job, as a software researcher, I do a lot of really different stuff.
All those different jobs require a different workflow. And almost always, a different set of tools.
Quite a few years ago, before I started working in the software industry, I was a graphic designer.
So when a friend of mine recently asked me to design a website for her photography business, I jumped at the chance. After overworking the left hemisphere of my brain all day every day in the software business, I often feel like I need to pay more attention to my artistic endeavors, to prevent the right side of my brain from withering away entirely.
This was a fun project. And, the whole thing only took about a day and a half, from start to finish (including the code and the database), so it wasn’t too much of a distraction.
Anyhow, without further ado, I present to you: Emily Brown Photography
I’m pretty happy with how the website turned out, but I can’t really take much credit for it. I just tried to get out of the way and let her excellent photography speak for itself.
If you know me very well (or at all), you probably know that I’m not a bit of a framework hater. And the Enterprise Java community is one of the worst offenders in the ridiculously-complex framework department.
So it might surprise you to know how much I love Java, as a programming language. Despite its tendency toward frameworkiness, and despite a few recent warts in the language (autoboxing and generics are both great ideas, but both were implemented incorrectly, adding lots of unfortunate weirdness to the language), I think Java offers a very compelling value-proposition as a development platform.
So I’d like to give a little sumpthin’ back to the community, as my way of saying “Thank You”.
