Software

At Miami, I expected to study computer science. I switched to mathematics after I got to Maryland, but I had developed a decent set of software development skills. I have written many, many programs. Most of them were one-off and not worth mentioning. Some of them were awarded a longer life and those I have posted to GitHub over the years.

Generally, I create software in the Unix tradition, this is, do one thing and do it well. I have been a BSD user since about 1996. BSD, like Linux, is a free Unix-like system but is constructed as a comprehensive system rather than cobbled together from parts. This gives the BSD-based systems many advantages, and my platform of choice, these days, is MacOS X on the desktop and FreeBSD on the server. One of the most interesting software projects I have here is FreeGrep, a BSD-licensed implementation of the grep pattern matching suite.

Now, most of my code projects support my data science habit. I have written a few packages in R for record linking and financial waterfall charts. These all follow the same design principles of doing one thing and doing it well.

Image by Eric Gaba via Wikimedia Commons.