simon says

dad, software engineer, gamer and esports aficionado

Status Quo

It has been several years since I last blogged and last time I mainly blogged about politics and food, this time it will be family, code and the occasional esport event.

Since then lots of things happened most important of all I had a beautiful daughter with my wonderful girlfriend Liv on the 3th of october 2010. Laura is now 1½ year old - time flies! Life as a dad really is wonderful and every single day she learns something new - I gotta say I’m a bit astounished as to how quick it’s all happening - my god I’m a big cliché :)

I finished my master thesis which I wrote with my friend Anders. In January 2011 i started fulltime at NETlinQ where I had worked as a student-programmer since May 2010. When I got an oppotunity to join my long time friend Martin at d60 I just had to take it, so since December 2011 I have been slinging code at d60.

Though I find myself quite busy with the family, job and everything I manage to keep reading books and blogs and listening to the many great software development podcasts. Lately I’ve been doing a bit of opensource development mainly on the Rebus service bus which is a project started and mainly developed by my colleague Mogens.

One of my goals of 2012 is to learn functional programming (FP). Back in 2009 I briefly attended a course entitled ‘Introduction to Functional Programming’ but it turned out that it wasn’t really much of an introduction since it assumed prior knowledge of the ML language. To me, it all seemed a bit arcane with the emacs-fanatic instructor and all.

I always wanted to learn FP though, first of all I find the declerative style of code beautiful and I think mastering multiple paradigms can only make you a better developer. Second of all I’m sure there’s much potential for these types of languages, especially in this distributed multicore world we now live in.

Since I’m working at a company that mainly uses the .NET stack I decided that F# would be the choice for my first FP language - this way I might even get to use it in my everyday work. F# has a bunch of great learning resources and a great community website at FPish. Currently I’m reading Real-World Functional Programming which contains a great introduction to the paradigm in general and F# in particular. Besides reading the book I’ve started solving the Project Euler problems in F#, I havn’t gotten far yet, I’ve actually only had time to solve the first two problems. My solutions are as follows:

That’s it for this time!