Lots of Life Updates

The main reason why I've been to pre-occupied to blog regularly this year is because my house now contains a one-year-old. My son, Billy, is by far my most amazing creation. He's also the busiest kid I've ever seen in my life. Busy in a good way, he's extra curious about everything.

Since becomming a father I've gained a new appreciation of how I spend what little free time I now have. Before, I used to waste so much time just clicking through facebook or reddit, knowing that there would always be time to get the important things done in a few hours. That's all in the past now, and I'm learning how to make forward progress on the things that I want to complete (my phd, home improvements, etc) and I'm also learning that there are some things that I'd like to pursue that will have to take a back seat for now, or possibly forever.

I completed my PhD Comprehensive Examination earlier this year and I'm in the process of getting set for my research proposal. It's been a difficult year with everything going on, but I'm making progress. More on this topic in future blog poss.

I've successfully converted my company into a C++ shop. We've made the executive decision to keep Delphi as a legacy-only language, and that all new development will either be in C++ for critical pieces, or a combination of Go/typescript/etc for projects where speed or baremetal programming isn't the primary concern. I now spend the majority of my day programming in modern C++, and I could not be happier.

Since the start of this year I've also been involved in the C++ ISO committee. I got to meet Michael Wong of Codeplay at an OpenCL conference back in 2017, and after some discussion he invited me to apply to be a member of the Canadian delegation to the ISO. What this all means is that now I'm not only in a position to use C++ in my day-to-day work, but I also get to travel and take part in making future C++ standards. I like the idea of working to make C++ more and more into the ideal language for speaking to computers. I've got another blog post in the oven about why I prefer C++ over more "modern" languages. Maybe one day I'll get around to writing it.