I’m still alive

December came and went. January came and went. February came and went…

Yes, I’m alive. I’ve been going through a whirlwind this past few months. Here’s a few things that have gone on.

A promotion!

Yep, the wonderful folks I work for at {redacted} have given me the grand title of “Principal Software Developer.”

Having worked here for 5 years now, I am officially to blame for most all the code here. I’ve been here long enough to own it. It’s my bad, folks, but it’ll get better, I promise.

Softball Season

I help run a local girls’ slowpitch league, and have been coaching and umpiring for 5 years now. Softball season starts around the beginning of March, but the work up to the season starting is substantial.

Coaching and helping out my league is meaningful for me. I don’t have better words for it. It’s just an amazing thing that I love to do.

Conferences

I was at Agile Open Northwest and a local programmer introduced a concept he was excited about called “tiny objects”, wherein he used C# to make objects that had:

1. No state.
2. Content that was immutable.
3. Just methods.

Finally, he had constructed a few rules as well, to make mocking and testing easier.  Specifically, there was to be no static methods on an object.

var example = "some string";
var stringUpper = new StringUppercaser(example).Result;
Assert.That(stringUpper, Is.EqualTo("SOME STRING"));

It. Was. Surreal.

This developer was exactly where I had been. Frustrated by state logic. Completely tired of dealing with new ways to worry about async and threading issues. He just had not heard of or even considered that the language itself was part of the problem.

That is simply why this blog exists.

Immediately, I setup a quick session in the conference to go over how functional programming works, and where to learn about it. Hopefully, I helped some folks see the light, but I doubt it, as I didn’t have a great talk already ‘set up.’ My note to self after that session was that putting together a half-hour talk on What and Why F# is just something I should have in my back pocket.

So there it is.  With a new promotion and getting my team ready to go, we are knee deep in a hundred different maintenance projects. Too many projects, not enough F#!

Thanks to the folks at F# Weekly finding my Fishful of Dollars post!