Programming
should be more than just defending the world from aliens, trying to score with hot
babes, and killing all the
grandmothers in the nursing home. Programming, coding, problem solving, creating,
and making the world better are all united concepts. When you scratch a place in the
ground for a plant to grow, or change the pH in your fish tank, or tell your children
that cows are called ‘horses’ so that they confuse the other kids in school when they
ask for some horse milk with their lunch…when you do those things, you’re programming. Recursive erudition is
a log of adventures in understanding what problems can be solved, and what riddles
can be expressed. It exists to teach and, by so doing, to learn. It exists to learn
and, by so doing, to teach.

This weblog will contain explanations of how to perform various tasks with code. I
will discuss design principles, best practices, and those evil little programming
mind viruses that spawn from head to head across the wire like something from a Sandra
Bullock movie. There will be reviews of tools and services that I find useful. I will
aggregate the more interesting articles I find around the web and provide links to
the ones I’d like to remember or share, or I may just copy a bunch of links from my
RSS feed so that it looks like I’m posting (mock me if I do this). Occasionally, there
will be something funny, newsworthy, or personal…but I share those things elsewhere,
so that should be rare. This weblog will mainly contain boring technical readouts
for my world-demolishing super-weapons.

I expect to receive four benefits from writing and sharing here:

1. A greater depth of learning: it takes a greater understanding to teach something than
   it does to learn it. I will clarify my understanding of what I learn by sharing the
   techniques and philosophies from the giant fire hose in my pants called The Internet.
   (Did you know they make those hoses out of tape? Freaky.)

2. An opportunity to give back: there are so many folk out there who have helped me learn
   what I know so far. Their efforts have made it easier for me to get started in a demanding
   field. I’d like to give something back–and I don’t just mean fart jokes. I doubt
   what I write here will be groundbreaking, or even new. However, so many of the fundamentals
   have been covered completely by those who have gone before…and they’ve moved on.
   A rehash of years-old technology with a viewpoint from the present day may be a worthwhile
   refresh of the tutorials that taught me what I know.

3. A repository of documentation: I’m learning things faster than I can remember them.
   I need a place to look up the things I’ve learned and accomplished already. I will
   wake up every morning, like Drew Barrymore, and read my blog. I will find out that
   my parents were really hamsters, and that I married a spatula after 100 dates and
   a good spanking. But most of all, I won’t forget how to use a regular expression to
   detect valid email addresses. 

4. Relaxation: David Allen has taught the world
   that things in your head give you stress. I want to let those nasty little Thetans
   out of my head. Once it’s written here, I can forget about it in safety. Writing is
   also a great creative outlet, and that’s a piece of peace as well.

We’ve almost reached the top of the hour, here, so it’s time for our human interest
piece. Since I’m the only human here, I guess you’ll just have to take an interest
in me. My name is Josh Rivers. I’m 35, have been married for just over a year, hope
to have my first son–or at least a lizard–in the next year, and have worked in the
computer field for more than a decade. Half of my career has been as an independent
business owner and contractor. I’ve been coding since I was 10 (if-you-call-writing-password-programs-for-my-computers-using-my-first-name-as-a-password-because-it-was-cool-in-War-Games-to-keep-the-girls-from-getting-into-my-computer-programming),
but my real professional focus started about 2 years ago when I started developing
web and Windows Forms applications for my I.T. Services clients. Since then, I’ve
gone through several memetic confusions of explosive learning, and I’ve got several
more building on the horizon. There is so much to learn, and I love every moment of
it.

This site was made with dasBlog, Color
Scheme Generator 2, and some notes from Steve
Trefethen.