| id | title | date | author | layout | guid | image | menu-order | menu-label |
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2858 |
Software |
2015-09-20 18:03:41 -0400 |
James Howard |
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Software |
At Miami, I expected to study computer science. I switched to mathematics after I got to Maryland, but I had developed a decent set of software development skills. I have written many, many programs. Most of them were one-off and not worth mentioning. Some of them were awarded a longer life and those I have posted to GitHub over the years.
Generally, I create software in the Unix tradition, this is, do one thing and do it well. I have been a BSD user since about 1996. BSD, like Linux, is a free Unix-like system but is constructed as a comprehensive system rather than cobbled together from parts. This gives the BSD-based systems many advantages, and my platform of choice, these days, is MacOS X on the desktop and FreeBSD on the server. One of the most interesting software projects I have here is FreeGrep, a BSD-licensed implementation of the grep pattern matching suite.
Now, most of my code projects support my data science habit. I have written a few packages in R for record linking and financial waterfall charts. These all follow the same design principles of doing one thing and doing it well.
Image by Eric Gaba via Wikimedia Commons.
