Hi, I’m Joe.
When I was 7, I started learning Karate; when I was 12, guitar; and when I was 13, I started learning to program. Today, as I write this, I have a first dan black belt in Shotokai Karate, I can fingerpick my way through Nothing Else Matters by Metallica (amongst other things), and I have written thousands of lines of code in a handful of different programming languages, achieving hundreds of different objectives*. I live in Dublin, and work at Google as a Software Engineer in Site Reliability Engineering.
If someone were to ask me to describe myself with a single word, I would probably choose the word programmer. People often glaze over when I bring up programming. It’s like I’ve suddenly started speaking in a completely different language, often despite my efforts to explain things in elementary terms.
I spend a large amount of my personal time writing code. Sometimes it is code which will make my life easier, but more often than not it is something I thought would be fun to make, or fun to use. This while site exists mostly so that I have somewhere to put descriptions, demos, or screenshots of my projects. If you have known me for a long time, chances are I have sent you something like this.
Perhaps one day I will get bored of programming, but for now you will have to put up with it.
* These objectives have varied in complexity from large and intricate projects like raytracers down to silly scripts for replacing every word on facebook with HORSE.