Blogger on Syntopikon

Ruben Schade

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I ask myself that every day! I’m a human, traveller, retro computer enthusiast, otaku, coffee aficionado, and verbose list enumerator who’s more than a little intimidated at being interviewed on the same site as some extraordinarily talented and interesting people.

Professionally I’m a technical writer and solution architect at an independent cloud infrastructure provider in Australia and the US. The former involves producing tenders, documentation, handover briefs, and validating technical copy for the sales and marketing teams. The latter is a fancy term for sitting on sales calls, asking questions, and translating vague requirements into a codified spec that our other engineers can implement.

Roy Tang

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Roy Tang. Professionally I’m a freelance software developer, but I’m on a bit of a work hiatus now and am in a bit of a “wandering around and trying out things” phase. I write a blog on my personal site at https://roytang.net/blog/. Some of the things I’ve been trying out over the past few years are sketching, game development, and streaming on Twitch

Marijn van Hoorn

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Marijn van Hoorn, and i’m a student based in the north east of England who happens to maintain a personal website by the name of The Satyrs’ Forest in their free time.

How did you get interested in that?

I’m a member of the internet generation — my mum and dad met on IRC chat; the latter set up a curated list of bookmarks to introduce me to the world wide web in my childhood. I suppose my infatuation with internet sightseeing and personal sites began there. Sometime around 2017, i happened upon the free web host–cum–community Neocities, and figured i’d set up shop after burning all my social media accounts. The rest is history.

Wouter Groeneveld

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Wouter and I currently study creativity for problem solving in software engineering education. I also like baking bread and thinking about thinking, which I call brain baking.

How did you get interested in that?

By following my gut! Before stumbling into academia, I was a software engineer myself for more than a decade. The more junior (and senior!) applicants we interviewed, the more I was convinced that when it comes to programming, we value the wrong skills. It’s never the technicalities that causes all sorts of trouble, but the non-technical ones: communication, solution-oriented thinking, creativity, … The more I pondered that, the more I got interested in doing something about it. By then, I was also part-time teaching at the local faculty of engineering technology. I decided to thoroughly investigate what I thought was wrong with industry and education. Four years later, I’m nearly finishing my PhD on the topic.

Marc Barrowclift

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Marc Barrowclift, and I work full time on helping maintain the DVR Scheduler at Comcast. Nowadays, in my free time I’m typically either writing articles on my blog or recording a new episode for my podcast, Bad Music Hertz.

How did you get interested in that?

Funnily enough, the blog began seven years ago as a means to an end; my primary interest at the time was (and in many ways remains) web development & interface design, and I was desperate to create a place where I could learn and practice it. However, I was initially intimidated by the deeper knowledge required for building dynamic web apps, so the path of least resistance was taken in the form of a static personal website. The simple static website framework I went with (Jekyll) just so happened to also bring along with it rudimentary plain text blogging support. Since I was interested in playing around with article designs, I decided to commit to writing a few articles to populate the space. It was through the process of writing those “placeholder” articles that I discovered I was quite fond of it and took more of an active interest in finding more things to write about.

Stephen Floyd

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a native Texan who ventured to New England for college and never quite made it back. Instead I took a two-decade detour to NYC where I began an investment banking career, got married, had kids and earned a pilot’s license. But I did eventually convince my wife to move as far south as Virginia. My professional career is focused on advising corporate clients on mergers, acquisitions and divestitures.