Hi, my name is Dermot Kilroy. I am a .NET developer living in London, currently working in the Media industry on the content management system for one of Britain’s largest websites.
My interest in computers began way way back in the days of windows 95/98. I had reached the dizzying heights of middle management in the service industry and now had to use a PC as part of my job. As a typical user I found them to be incredibly frustrating and always wanted to do things in a different way to that suggested by the help files. The frustration of not understanding what was going on under the hood led me on a quest through formal education in Internet computing at The London South Bank university. I graduated from University in 2005 and have been working on Asp.Net C# applications ever since.
I have started this blog for one simple reason: have you seen what’s happened to Jeff Attwood since he started waffling on in 2004? I figure i can waffle with the best of them, so watch out blogosphere I’m coming to get ya. Oh yeah and I also have a lot to learn and say on all the usual topics of agile software development. Also it makes a nice way for me to formalise my learning with a searchable repository of topics related to software development, as well as a place for me to vent about the software industry in general from time to time. Finally, if only one person learns something from my ramblings on these pages then I will be happy that my work was not in vain. Hi mum I am on the Interweb…
I have chosen the humble programmer as the title of my blog after the paper by Edsger W. Dijkstra. The essence of the paper struck a chord with my approach to software development:
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
Throughout university and in my short career thus far I have felt that our industry promotes the need to hide the fact that sometimes we just don’t get it. This attitude stops us asking the simple questions that need to be asked for fear of being labeled as stupid. After reading Dijkstra’s paper I realised that I had to be confident in what I do know and willing to work really hard to learn and understand what I don’t. I figure that by publishing what I do know that I might be able to help someone by passing on that knowledge. I also want to learn from the collective power of the web and I am sure that if my understanding of a topic is less than correct, people will let me know.
TheHumbleProgrammer 