Introduction

Post date: Sep 10, 2010 1:15:34 PM

About me: I'm a professional software developer who also likes to craft code in my free time for fun or to "scratch my own itch." Lately, this means writing tiny applications for Linux using the FLTK interface library targeting Tiny Core Linux, although many of my apps should work fine in other Linux distributions as well. I created this website to make it easier for interested people to try, test, and perhaps someday directly collaborate on my pet software projects. Unless noted otherwise, you should find that all of these projects are released under the GNU Public License (GPL).

I call myself Mike Lockmoore on certain Linux websites and around here. No, that's not my real name, but you can find it in the copyright notices in my software. I don't have much to hide, but I don't want to make life too easy for the web spiders!

I live in the Detroit, Michigan area and do my professional work mostly in the automotive industry. For the past four years or so, I've had the pleasure of developing software for embedded Linux applications at work. Longer ago, I did a fair amount of Win32 and MFC coding in Windows. I might even post a little of that stuff someday.

I mostly work in C and a fairly limited subset of C++ (enough to make working with FLTK practical) and a some bash scripting. I have worked with Pascal, Python, various versions of BASIC, and assembler, but mostly in the past. I'm a fan of Forth, and it's inventor, Chuck Moore, but I don't find myself wanting to use it much anymore. I'm too effective and efficient with C today. I'm pretty much a "Duct Tape Programmer" today, after having been through many fads of development tools, methods, and processes and suffered under some "architecture astronauts" over the years. I appreciate a minimal mindset and "do one thing well" focus to software. For example, I love this blog about using Linux on older computers, but I'm not as devoted to the command-line. I like a little GUI here and there, as long as its fast! That's probably why I'm enjoying playing with FLTK and Tiny Core Linux these days. It's small, fast, and efficient. Just like I like. Good software needn't be big!