My name in Eric Richardson and I finally decided to get off my duff, or maybe on my duff since I am sitting here writing this post. My good friend Rob Rucker who was my professor at Arizona State University when I got my Masters Degree has encouraged me to write for a long time but being motivated enough to actually do it is something I have lacked. My brain is not devoid of thoughts and ideas and I'm hoping some of this internal noise may be of interest to others once externalized.
I recently moved from Manhattan Beach, California where I lived with my wife and three beagles for 10 years to Traverse City, Michigan. I lived in TC from Junior High up through college where I graduated from Michigan Technological University with a degree in Metallurgical Engineering. Here in Michigan there are four seasons whereas in Southern California there was essentially one, sunny and mild. The Los Angeles area can be quite taxing with so many people, traffic, and one season leading to no down time. I spent a ton of time there riding and racing my bicycle which I really enjoyed but it was basically a part time job riding 10-12 hours a week, 8000 miles a year just to be marginally competitive. Seth Davidson has a very popular blog there entitled "Cycling in the South Bay" which is a very entertaining read. I miss riding with Seth and the other cycling nuts in the area.
On the work side of things, I have worked with Java since its very first "production" version, 1.0.2 in early 1996. It was really fun to see the new features come out over the years and play with them when they were brand new. After so many years doing Java I needed something new. I started playing with Scala in 2011 and went to Scala Days at Stanford with Rob when 2.8 was still the main version and 2.9 was just brand new. This year I got to do Scala full time on a Spark project. I had been wanting to work with Scala full time for quite a while so this was nice to put all my studying and playing around to good use. I really like Scala and the language and libraries are continuing to improve so it is a pretty exciting time for computing using Scala.
