Hi, I'm Rob, this is my website! I am a 30-something programming enthusiast living in OKC with the love of my life, Kim. I grew up in Lawton, where in my youth I fell in love with videogames. They always captured my attention so well compared to everything else competing for it. I couldn't help but be captured in return. This led me eventually to modding my games, my version of taking things apart and putting them back together again. My first encounter with this was Dwarf Fortress which has plain text 'RAWs' which allowed kids like me to stitch together their own creatures and give them powers by using a tag system. Dwarf Fortress and it's complexity endlessly fascinated me, and once I began to learn programming in middle school, roguelikes were the first things I tried to make. I technically started out with TI-BASIC, which was a great way to cut my teeth on the way a computer liked to deal with problems I enjoyed pouring over the manual to write the very simple programs I made on my mom's graphing calculator to help with my math homework This naturally carried into BASIC in highschool, my first 'real' programming language in my mind. After I showed interest in programming to my professor, (who was used to the students checking out of every lesson to play flash games, by which no shade is intended, so did I every once in a while, and programming isn't for everyone) he spent a lot of one-on-one time after the primary lesson concluded to basically tutor me, which was amazing to my growth as a young programmer. Also in highschool, I attended a vocational program for 3D animation, which was a lot of fun. My friend Eddie and I attended together and it was a just a hell of a time. We even went to nationals together, and placed 8th out of 25. When we were graduating, he and I both competed in a local competition for 3D modeling and animation, which I won 1st in the animation section, for a cute little dancing robot I made. It won me an interview with the company that hosted it, but ultimately went nowhere. I'm thankful for it too, as my calling lay elsewhere. I went to college at Cameron University, and thankfully knew what I wanted to major in: Computer Science, it was both of my favorite things in one, whats not to like? To pay for all this learning, I worked at Walmart while living with my parents. The degree took twice as long as it should have, due to my inability to juggle both responsibilities at once with undiagnosed adult ADHD. I managed to make a 3.2 GPA, which helped me land me my first career position at Leidos. Once there, I got educated, and got treated for my ADHD, which allowed me to excel in my position. I was as obsessed with programming then as I am now, which also helped. There I learned a lot in 4 years. We worked in Ada, Java, C++, SQL, Perl, and I am probably forgetting some. I have matured a lot as a developer, in both how to build bigger things, but also in what NOT to do, which I would argue can be more valuable at times. It was a blast solving hard problems and I made several friends there that I still am close with today. Now I am looking for the next step, and building things that interest me in the meantime. This website is one of those things.
My most recent obsession is the relatively nascent programming language Uiua. It take a lot inspiration from array languages (such as APL, J, K, BQN) while also combining it with a stack oriented design. It also uses symbolic glyphs to represent a majority of its built-in functions. Taking all of these things in concert results in VERY terse code. And typically, its FAST. Due to it's array orientation, it can really take advantage of SIMD instructions. I've laboriously optimized code for hours to get performance like Uiua achieves with minimal effort, I swear by it. The cost comes in learning to read the code after it's written and learning how imperitive algorithms look through the lens of an array paradigm but it does a great job of teaching you if you stick with it. I have been building almost everything I make for fun with it, as it has been the freshest programming has felt. So the site is made with Webua, a Uiua community library for writing websites. This allows seamlessly weaving the power of Uiua's expressiveness through the part of web dev that can get very tedious for myself.