About Eric (high tech)

Coder, Artist, Author

Eric was a software coder for a good 20 years, along with a stint doing technical demos and benchmarks for large sales opportunities.

He was never an engineer, though. He was more of an artist, always striving for perfection — and chafing at deadlines. Of course, much of the time he spent perfecting his programs is time down the drain. The computers they ran on no longer exist, and there are now much better platforms for developing software.

It was a good way to make a living. Along the way, he acquired a working knowledge of 20+ programming languages, and an equivalent number of scripting languages, becoming proficient in quite a few. (At one point, he even made a list and counted them.)

His favorite language by far is still Ruby, because of its power, and because lets you write “metalanguages” (code you can run that reads like the text in this sentence). He didn’t get to use that feature very much, but he loved the ecosystem of testing tools and system-scripting tools that took advantage of it. The were powerful and flexible, but at the same time simple and easy.

At one point he thought he was burned out (what he really needed was glasses!), so he became a writer. (Like all programmers of the day, to his mind writing was “easy”. He was wrong. Oh man, was he wrong.) But technology’s loss is, hopefully, mankind’s gain. He found he had a talent for explaining complex topics in a (relatively) easy-to-understand manner.

It took a good 10 years to master that skill. But he has come pretty close. He loves the YouTube videos that have given him so much “how to” skills that aren’t easily shared in writing. But writing is still the best way to share detailed information in a way that can be easily found. So he writes books and articles to share helpful information he has acquired in his journey through life.

Learn even more: The Many Facets of Eric