About me

Last updated: 2020-03-27

Welcome, I'm Evan Carlin. I'm many things but as it pertains to this site I'm a programmer and an aspiring hacker (but not a painter ;))

I'm from Boulder, CO and currently live and work in Denver. I'm a fan of all the typical outdoor "ings" (biking, skiing, running, kayaking, ...). When I’m not hacking I'm almost certainly doing one of them.

I went to college at the University of Puget Sound (a choice based on tuition and an "ing," skiing) where I majored in computer science. Before college, the closest I had come to programming was a weekend I spent trying to get a music tagging program running when I was twelve. It required building a Java program using Ant and — perhaps not surprisingly — I never even got it to build.

I took a CS class my freshman year of college for a reason approximating "sounds interesting and I hopefully won't have to write a paper." It's cliche but true: I was hooked from the first assignment (moving a turtle around the screen).

There are many reasons why I enjoy programming. A few that stand out:

  1. Abstraction: Computer programs are layers upon layers of abstractions. I could write a million metaphors about how wonderful a good abstraction is but none of them would really capture it. Using or writing a good one is a true pleasure.
  2. Balance between computers and humans: Code is an interface between programmers and other programmers, programmers and end-users, and incidentally programmers and computers. These forces are often in opposition. Balancing them seems to be mostly an art with some science. This blend works well for me.
  3. Long periods of time to think: I prefer not to multitask. I need long stretches of uninterrupted time to perform at my best. Having a lot of time to think isn’t unique to programming but nonetheless it offers plenty of space to do so. I love being in the flow and having hours whiz by.

I currently work for Radiasoft on Sirepo (source code), a gateway for running scientific computing simulations in the cloud (oooh jargon, no seriously it's cool:)).

For all of my professional experience please visit my LinkedIn.

I used to maintain my personal projects on GitHub. Then I briefly moved to GitLab. I now use SourceHut. I like their business model (users pay for the service) and I appreciate the dedication of the creator of the site.

For more info about this site, please read this.

I'd love to hear from anyone that happened to find their way here. Please send me an email at evan at carlin dot com.

Thanks for reading.