There are lots of ways to approach technology and science in general. Personally, I’ve always loved solving problems. Not abstract exam-type problems, but real world problems – can whatever it is be made to work and do something useful?
Of course, I may occasionally stretch the definition of usefulness, but each problem I solve tends to give me another tool I can use somewhere else. In this way I like to build upon my knowledge, with each level attained giving me concrete results. This is the essence of learning by doing.
I tend to have fairly eclectic interests when it comes to software and technology. I don’t label myself as any particular brand of geek, and I hold no allegiance to any particular OS or development platform, though my experience does tend to give me a web development and user experience bias.
Like many geeks, I can be lazy, preferring to use a script or tool for some laborious task rather than attempting it manually. However, I believe almost all tools should have easily discoverable affordances and that there is no excuse for not making something usable.
So, I do tend to acquire knowledge in a fairly ad hoc manner, but this has served me reasonably well over the 12 years of my IT career so far. This blog is an attempt to document some of the problems and solutions that I find interesting, or particularly annoying. You can expect to see C#, SQL, ActionScript, HTML, ECMAScript, CSS and anything else I either find interesting or is required to solve a problem I come across.
