Who I Am
Who I Am
Professionally, I’m an aerospace engineer that has found my true love in writing scientific software for the aviation research community. In my opinion, that union of aerospace and software engineering makes me a Research Software Engineer. So, two things to know about me:
- I love crafting scientific software;
- I strongly suspect that computational science is a third pillar of science, standing in parallel with theory and experimentation.
There you go. But, why am I here?
What I’m Doing Here
This blog is partly a professional portfolio and partly a place for me to think publicly. I have things I want to communicate about, whether it’s something cool I’ve done at work or something interesting I’m reading about or something that I find interesting to think about. I’m not trying to generate a huge following or rise above the internet’s noise. I’m just trying to get my thoughts out there, talk about what I know about, and make some progress in thinking along the way.
If you want to go deeper than reading my thoughts, choose an option on the left and get in touch. I’m open to conversation, but only interested in talk that really moves thoughts & ideas forward. My life is appropriately active, so I’m not looking for social media chatter.
Reality Check
Writing blog posts isn’t my full-time hobby.
Here’s the deal. Outside of my professional activities, I have an active family life and that’s a priority for me – I don’t apologize for that. I’ll write blog posts when I can, but I have no expectations of doing this at high frequency. I have a large list of things I want to write about, and it grows rather than shrinks with each blog post. There’s a lot to think about in the world and that’s a good thing. I’ll make progress as I’m able.
Slow-&-Steady is my style.
What’s With the Silly Username
Why do I go by buffetboy2001 on GitHub? So, in college I got the nickname in a somewhat undeserved manner. I liked buffets, as did my fellow laborers in the graduate lab I was in at the University of Maryland. We had a weekly habit of hitting up the buffet restaurants in our local area (College Park, MD, USA) for lunch. We’d eat a ton of cheap Chinese cuisine – to get our money’s worth – and then head back to the lab for coffee and class. :D Life was good. Somehow, I came out of that with the nickname buffetboy. I like it, so now it’s my GitHub username.
What’s With the Avatar
There are legitimate reasons to shy away from plastering one’s image all over the place. My image, in the form of a picture or drawing or whatever, is not who I am. So, I prefer to use a logo rather than a face. My logo is a snippet of a still life painting by American 19th century painter John Frederick Peto. The contents of this particular still-life painting, beer steins and tobacco pipes and such, represent a place of familiar comfort to me.