My name is Ed.

I make stuff.

I make big stuff fast
and I make fast stuff pretty
and I twitch at bad UX
and I use tabs over spaces mostly because I can.

I dig

Scala
and C #
and Redis
and Mongo

and unless you just peeked at the source you'd have no idea whatsoever that this ugly run-on trainwreck of a sentence cunningly disguised as a paragraph is in fact crammed chock-full of semantic list.

I also love hockey to the point where perhaps I should have been born a Canadian.

I went to the University of Maine.

It was cold.

I graduated with a degree in Computer Science, which means that my scribblings on our igloo walls and the little toy programs that I submitted on tanned seal skins were sufficient to convince at least a few people that I know something about making the little gnomes in the computer box do the things I tell them to do.

You may be further astounded to know that I graduated cum laude, which I must surmise is a phrase known to professors and classics majors as "went to class when able to elude the polar bear." Below you will note that I have included a picture of a polar bear, for emphasis.

credit: wikipedia. thanks, dudes! — Emphasis.

Now I have a job.

It involves owls.

Twenty dollars? But I wanted a peanut!
Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts.

COME ON, AT LEAST BLINK ONCE IN A WHILE — STOP STARING AT ME, OWL

I work at TripAdvisor. The money they pay me pays my rent and feeds my habit of purchasing shiny new gadgets at an alarming rate. I write Java and JavaScript a little Python and more bash scripts than I ever thought I'd write, and I volunteered to be the point man for fielding questions when our SVN server yarks on its shoes.

I staple advertisements on anything that isn't moving and occasionally on something that is. But I get bored easily and have my nose in all manner of other bits of the site and engineering ops.

Shameless self-promotion?

Don't mind if I do!

I ramble long-form on my blog.

I'm @edropple on the twitter. Follow me to see me accuse open-source luminaries like @fabpot of being robots dug out of crashed flying saucers.

You can see if my book, A Very Negative Book About PHP, is done yet here.

And to see what little open-source fiddlybits I've had time for lately, look me up at eropple on Bitbucket and Github. (I've had more time recently to write some open-y stuff again, this should grow in the nearish future. No promises, though.)