Welcome!

Welcome to Flink And Blink, my software engineering blog. I've been developing software since 1982, primarily with a background in networking, such as routers, video streaming servers, and now IOT (Internet Of Things). I work primarily in the embedded and backend spaces, with some dabbling in frontend apps.

I'm mostly self-taught, which really means I've had many teachers, the many authors of books and articles, the many designers and developers who have built the things I've studied and worked on.

The most important thing this has taught me is that learning is a never-ending experience. The most important skill you can develop is the ability to learn new skills.

I love to learn new things, and I'm not afraid to make mistakes doing it. As long as there's no damage and no injury, it's all a learning experience. And a little blood on the deck isn't an injury.

I've always found that if I have technical information and a system to play on, I can learn how to make it go. Experimentation, both the successes and the failures, is a great learning tool.

Thomas Edison said, "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." I temper that with Nikola Tesla's response: "...a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor." While it's Edison we all remember, it's Tesla's AC outlets that we plug everything into.

I like to combine the two approaches into informed experimentation. Try it and see, but think about it first. The analytical and empirical methods make a powerful combination.

Teaching is also a great way to learn. I have to be able to figure things out if I'm going to explain them.

The discipline of writing things down and drawing up diagrams forces me to order my thoughts. That then leaves me with something I can pass on to others to share the knowledge. That's part of the see one, do one, teach one methodology.

I've previously posted software-related things to my woodworking blog, CloseGrain. I'll cross-post some of those here.

Why "flink and blink"? Those who are wise in the ways of computer science will recognize these as the forward link and backward link of a double linked list, one of the fundamental data structures.