Hi, I‘m Brad
And here‘s some things about me…
I love creating things. Most days, I‘m writing software or developing products through my companies or for my clients. I also deeply enjoy producing music (now award winning), making photos, and reading up on typography, graphic design, or other crafts. There‘s something about seeing an idea come to life that‘s infinitely inspiring to me. Indeed, if there was a way for me to fully live in the present, it would be in the immediacy of creativity.
For the present is the point at time at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them.
Opinions & Favorites
I write code with Neovim and keep it organized and versioned with Git, using Jujutsu. Linus, thank you so very much that I never have to use SVN or CVS ever again. 🙏 I‘ve completely fallen in love with functional programming (for application development tasks), where I prefer Elixir for backend and server-side application development. Before this, I used Ruby on Rails for over a decade (since 0.9.1) as my backend framework of choice. I also contributed a bit to Rails core. Though I‘ve moved on to other tools for larger projects, I still choose Ruby for quick-n-dirty scripts.
I‘ve been dabbling around with Rust and Zig more these days for when I need to reach for a systems-level programming language, quickly replacing my previous choice of C/C++. Python is still my “I need to do something data-science related,” usually with PyTorch as a framework for making the numbers happen, although on recent projects I'm using Elixir's fantastic numeric ecosystem. I‘ve used TensorFlow too, but I find myself gravitating more towards the former when I need to reach for a framework. Long ago, I got my start with Perl, PHP, and Java. I now think OOP is bad.
Database engineering & design is something with which I‘m intimately familiar. I got my stripes with Oracle 7-10g, then quickly moved to MySQL, MariaDB, and finally arrived in the promised land of PostgreSQL. I tried the NoSQL thing (like everyone else), including MongoDB (for the right reasons), and still ended up back in RDMS-land. Mongo DB Is Web Scale I still think NoSQL is great if you genuinely need it, though that decision should be very carefully weighed.
I‘ve never considered myself a “front-end” specialist, yet I‘ve gained considerable experience with JavaScript (Vanilla, ES6, etc.), including the great D3.js visualization library. I‘ve played around with Elm a bit, but with Phoenix and (LiveView) I wonder if I‘ll ever need to reach for a front-end framework again.
I tend to choose Kubernetes these days for deployment and orchestration, Terraform for declarative infrastructure management, and an increasing amount of Nix. I spent quite some time navigating the AWS, GCP, and OCI ecosystems and their various flavors of deployment and server/server-less tools. When it comes to consistency between testing and deployment environments, and ease of deployment in general, Docker and other containerization technology is my go-to.
Miscellaneous
I‘ve developed quite a few patents in the process of building CloudSight and iAsk AI, and had a lot of fun with speaking engagements too.