About

My name is Marty and I’m a tech enthusiast, who also enjoys cycling and everything Duke University.

I’ll post here as a personal record of certain things I find important, or would like to remember – typically as a reference if I need to do the same thing in the future. Trying not to reinvent the wheel, and all.

If you find something useful, great! If you don’t, I’m not surprised.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. … The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, an few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.”

-Frederick P. Brooks, “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)”