Self Introduction

Hello internet people,
I've been a computer programmer since my parents bought me an Apple IIc when I was 7.  I'm 36 now, and my path in life, since then, went like this:

• ProDOS BASIC, for choose your own adventure games on the Apple IIc
• Labview for Windows, at an AT&T Bell Labs internship
• MudOS LPC, when I ran my own MUD
• Java, for developing a legend of Zelda-like game for Software Engineering class
• Perl, for an AT&T e-billing system
• Perl, PL/SQL and Java, for the backend functionality at Register.com
• J2EE, for enterprise-networking software at Avaya
• C, Java, Visual C++, and C#, for simulation software at CSC
• Visual C++ and Java, for operational awareness software at Viecore FSD and then Future Skies
• Java and C, for flight simulation software at MIT Lincoln Laboratory
• Javascript/CSS for front end and Java with Spring for backend, transferring and accessing broadcast video at Reuters
• Python, Flex/Actionscript, and Java, for portfolio accounting software at Hedgeserv
• Scala, Java, Python, and Objective C, for web and mobile publishing at New York Magazine

At this point in my career, I have three main interests that serve as the motivation for this blog:

• I am invigorated by the recent push in the world of software development toward functional, non-blocking programming.  In particular, I've absolutely loved learning about Scala recently, and plan to work towards greater expertise leveraging its capabilities.
• I have become more attuned to the need for adherence to established design patterns, and want to better familiarize myself with them, in an effort to better exploit their capabilities given an opportunity.
• It is difficult to stay abreast of all immediately-relevant open source technologies.  For nearly any challenge that exists in programming, I've found that someone has developed some sort of solution that will at least partially alleviate its inherent difficulties.

So, in general, that's what I'll be posting about.  Nice to make your acquaintance, don't be a stranger, and feel free to point out anything I wrote that you think is good, bad, right, wrong, misguided or silly.
Thanks for reading!