This site is about programming(mostly) things I either do or am learning.
Hello. My name is Ken McFadden. Born and raised in So. Cal I spent my formative years(always wanted to say that) in San Diego, but have called Los Angeles my home for the past 25 years. In my early career I coded on IBM Platform systems from system/38 to as/400 to iseries, and I am an expert in all flavors of the RPG programming language and SQLRPG and DB/2 as well as the operating system and CL programming language. That machine is so old recruiters often call it a “mainframe” but back in the day it was called midrange, not mainframe. Mainframe is Cobol! Anyway…I made a good living on that machine but like anything else sooner or later companies want GUI and free software(free programmers too!) so it was time to expand.
I have transitioned to open source technologies and web. My favorite coding environment and language is ruby and Ruby on Rails, and my secondary focus is javascript and anything interesting. Front end comes in handy with anything on the web and even mobile these days. I have actually studied more programming languages than I can remember(Perl,Java,Python,Nodejs etc) but you have to choose one at some point. Python is not bad but honestly unless you are going to do a lot of data science stuff, I don’t see the desire there for me..since pythons is used a lot for data analyis(numpy/panda/data series/dataframes and all that) in the final analysis its just spreadsheets, so I figured cut out the middleman and just do Tableau.
This website is under construction meaning the junk below is placeholder for a .yml file. I am upgrading my Jekyll site to a newer version as the old one just got too jambled. You know how that goes. :>)
This site is really about introducing myself to the world as it relates to programming. It's not really a place where I will make comments about the decline of our "empire" or global warming.
It is also not a place where I will repeat things that are freely available on places like MDN Mozilla Developer Network or Ruby on Rails...I mean that's what those sites are for and hopefully I don't need to produce FILLER in order for you to think I can work for you. That said, what I do what to show here is what I think I understand about the technologies I use. Actually...I make you a promise(Not the ES6 kind)...if I state or restate something here, it means that I have studied, coded, and understand it. And normally it will be things that are beyond the basic things like the operations that can be performed on an array. What is the point of that?
It will high-lite what to me were "light-bulb" moments that to me were the "finally" explanation that opened the door of understanding to walk thru. So for me its a note in case I forget. And for each person that is most likely different. But in that case I would think that my view of how I came to grok something might actually be useful to someone else in the same boat. That's about it. Because I do believe that it you want something, you need to give it. For me knowledge is one of those things.
I also will have links to actual code or applications that I have written that reinforce that understanding.