Hello world!
I’m Daniel Rollins, an inquisitive software developer and programming enthusiast. I currently live in Leeds, UK with my wife, Hazel, and our trio of gerbils.
Unlike many software developers, I was bitten by the programming bug later on in life. I first cut my teeth in a C programming course whilst studying for my MEng in Electronic Engineering at the wonderful University of York. Understanding the interaction between code and hardware resonated strongly with me and from that point I was hooked. I threw myself at as many software engineering projects as my university would allow, including creating an FPGA-based MIDI synthesizer in C, musician teaching tool in Java and (an attempt at) a Finite element-based physics engine in C++.
After university, I spent a few years at iMBE at the University of Leeds, performing research into computational analysis vertebral fractures. I now work at FinancialForce where I help to design and build middleware and messaging infrastructure for cross-product integration on the Salesforce platform using Apex and Javascript.
Why am I blogging?
As I tried to outline above, I have a rather eclectic mix of backgrounds. I put this down to being very inquisitive and exploratory when it comes to technology and computing, I spend a lot of my personal time researching things I find interesting and have found myself saddened that I don’t have much of a record of the things I’ve learned so far. I hope to remedy this by posting about the things I’ve learned and topics of interest so I can refer to them later.
As to why I am doing that publicly? There are a number of reasons. I enjoy discussing and teaching others about technology and programming, so what better audience than those that are searching for the topics that I also care about? I also feel I can count on that audience to make sure I understand the things I am talking about correctly. Finally I hope that this blog will help me hold myself to account and continue to broaden my knowledge of the ever-growing world of programming and technology.
What will I post about?
My job keeps me fulfilled with software engineering challenges day-to-day, however outside of the workplace I have interests in a wide range of technologies that I like to post about. I would like to keep this blog focussed on the topics that I have a deep personal fondness of and would like to explore further, including C and C++, low-level systems programming and games development. That’s not to say I won’t get waylaid talking about other programming languages or technologies far outside that scope, but I feel narrow focus is best to start with.
The only guarantee I can make about my posts is that I found the topic compelling enough to write about. It may not be new information or ground-breaking insight, but I hope that at least someone else will learn something new from what I write.
Anything else?
I’d like to give a shout-out to John Somez at simpleprogrammer.com for the information on how to approach starting a new blog. I was a little anxious about the idea of posting publicly, but the advice in his course helped me get over that feeling and take the plunge!
Finally, I’d love for this blog to be a portal for discussion so I welcome email and comments.
Thanks for reading!