About me

Last updated: 2024-12-01

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

I'm from Boulder, CO and currently live in Denver. Outside of work I'm a fan of gerunds. All of the typical Colorado outdoor ones (biking, skiing, running, kayaking, ...). And garage hobby ones (wrenching and welding). 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.

At my $DAY_JOB I'm a full stack web developer building a website that helps physicists simulate particle accelerators. In my spare time I work on moss.

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: The flow. The zone. Letting time whiz by. Whatever you call it I love sitting down to a hard problem and realizing hours later I forgot to eat lunch. Work like this isn't unique to programming but there are plenty of opportunities for doing it while writing code.

For all of my professional experience (when I remember to update it) 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 [email protected].

Thanks for reading.