Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data
Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:
• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.
• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.
• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.
• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.
• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.
I could get the extra 48KB memory for less than IBM charged. More importantly, double sided floppy drives were already on the market but you couldn't get them from IBM at any price.
So I went to a local component supplier and got a pair of double sided drives. They worked "out of the box" in DOS, but unsurprisingly, only side 1 of each drive showed up as A: and B: drives.
So I wrote a TSR to add C: and D: drive letterss which were side 2 of each drive.
It was super easy.
Later I heard about a fancier TSR that combined side 1 and 2 of each drive into a single drive letter with twice the capacity.
But that was a much more complicated task, and I was happy enough with my four-drive-letter solution.
Engineer used 360-degree cam hidden in bag of snacks in attempt to steal DRAM process tech for China — IT security team pinpointed perp due to camera's leaky wireless signals
absolutely nobody used those outside of a language demo. We also got --erasableSyntaxOnly last year to remove them from the language. The TS team considers them “mistakes“ for a really long time now
Thanks for the correction! It was a long time ago that I used TypeScript, and making things worse (for my memory) it was an Angular project.
So today, most people and teams avoid the parts of TS that require compilation into different JS, and --erasableSyntaxOnly lets you enforce this, right?
Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data
Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:
• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.
• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.
• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.
• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.
• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.
In the Netflix series The Good Place, there is an AI character named Janet, who helps assist people who have gone to that place where you go after you die.
One quirk when you're in the Good Place: you can't use swear words. If you try to say "fuck" it comes out "fork".
Janet is portrayed brilliantly by D'Arcy Carden. Her dad is Dennis Erokan, who published MicroTimes and BAM (Bay Area Music) Magazine and produced the Bammies award festival. MicroTimes was one of those big thick magazines like Computer Shopper, full of interesting ads and a few articles.
After I discovered this, I found Dennis' email and wrote to him:
---
Hi Dennis!
Yes, I know it's usually D'Arcy who gets the autograph requests.
My friend Ro and I recently finished watching The Good Place. What a wonderful series!
I always enjoy learning about the people who worked to create a great show like this.
After a bit of research I was like "What the fork? Janet's real life dad is the MicroTimes guy!"
So I checked my archival drawer and found one of my old MicroTimes from 1996.
Ro lived in New York in the late 1980s, and she flew to SF a few of those years just to go to the Bammies.
Her secret hope was to somehow get acquainted with Steve Perry. But she did see Ted Nugent staring at her in a bookstore. So that was at least a consolation prize.
Ro's birthday is coming up later this month. I stealthily searched eBay and got the 1986 and 1988 BAM Magazines with the Bammies Scrapbooks.
I wonder if you could autograph these? I would be more than happy to take you out for lunch or dinner at any of your favorite places up in your neck of the woods. Or I could just bring them to your office or any location you want if that's more convenient for you.
And if we can work out a time when Ro could join us (probably easier on a weekend), she would be delighted to meet you!
---
Dennis was quite tickled by this. We took him to lunch at his favorite restaurant, he signed our MicroTimes and BAM magazines, and we all had a great time sharing stories about some of the people we knew.
This strategy for your legacy would not have been successful with stratoscope.geocities.com (RIP 2009), skyblog.com/stratoscobe (died in 2023 with no data export path offered), Posterous, MSN Spaces, Vine, and many others.
I am willing to bet that most of my domains will outlive "username.substack.com".
Excellent point! In fact I do have an automatic monthly donation to The Internet Archive.
Of course the URLs all change in archived pages, but at least the content is there for anyone motivated enough to find it.
A funny coincidence... I registered geary.com (my last name) in 1994, and just used it for email. A few years later I got a letter from a group of civic boosters in Geary, Oklahoma. They even enclosed a Geary Water Tower T-shirt which I still have. They saw that I didn't have a website up on this domain and asked me if they could have it.
I explained that this would be impractical since it was also my email address.
So they registered gearyok.com instead and put up a website built around Java applets. Oops.
But it got me thinking. I put up a static page (frequently edited by me) that I called Geary Central: A Guide to Gearys on the Net. This page is still up:
Naturally I gave Geary, Oklahoma top billing for inspiring this.
A few years after that I changed geary.com to a MoinMoin wiki devoted to the same topic, and moved the old static page to its current location.
Just a few days ago, someone emailed me about how they had stumbled onto my oldsite.html page and enjoyed this "blast from the past".
In 2011, my old ISP decommissioned the server I had the wiki on. I was planning to migrate it to something more modern like Drupal, but the time and effort weren't worth it to me at the time.
I did find the latest version of the "new" Geary Central on archive.org and shared it in my reply:
If you're in the US, average life expectancy is 79, so it will probably be fine for the next ~5 years.
If you're in Canada, or a G7/EU nation, it's in the 80s, so you may have 10+ years to go, so the chances of Substack being around in the same form for that time period is lower.
Remote: Yes, or hybrid if nearby
Willing to relocate: Possibly
Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data
Résumé/CV: https://www.geary.com/resume.html or https://www.geary.com/resume.pdf and https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgeary/
Email: mike@geary.com
Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:
• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.
• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.
• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.
• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.
• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.
• Technical and general interest writing.
Open to full time or contract.
I look forward to talking with you!
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