13 Nov 08 About
My name is Brian Neal. In gaming circles and some programming forums I am known as Gremmie. I’m a professional software engineer, mainly writing real-time embedded applications in C++. Over the last few years I have developed a fascination with web programming, and have picked up technologies like PHP, MySQL, and now my current favorites: Python and Django.
My interest in web programming started when I somewhat naively created a website with PHP-Nuke. Noticing that various features didn’t work (often in spectacular ways), I thought to myself, “well, I’m a programmer, I should be able to fix these things.” Pulling up my favorite editor and looking at the source code for the first time was a shocking experience. Soon I found myself collaborating over the internet with a dedicated team of people improving and adding features to a popular distribution of PHP-Nuke. There were many, many bugs to fix and improvements to be made. I developed several PHP-Nuke applications and contributed bug fixes to this distro for a year or two. Eventually I grew weary of the tedious nature of maintaining a web application that had such a poor infrastructure framework and began looking at what others were doing. I soon discovered the Django web framework, and quickly saw the benefits of programming on top of such a well thought out and thoroughly documented framework. Programming in Python was also a nice bonus as it was another new thing to learn. And so I began converting the features of my current website to Django, and this blog was born soon thereafter.
I should mention that my interest in web programming was driven soley by my interest in Surf Music. I wanted to create an online community to bring together Surf Music fans and musicians. Surfguitar101.com, aka SG101, is the product of these efforts. SG101 needed a decent calendar so that bands could post show dates. SG101 needed a way for members to upload demo mp3′s. So I taught myself PHP and wrote these applications and integrated them into Nuke. I also added a photo of the day and a google maps application. All of these things I plan on porting to the django framework, and this will be the main subject of my blog.
And finally, another thing I like to do is play online multiplayer games with friends. I’ve been gaming with a group of nuts for about 3 years now, mainly playing the Call of Duty series of games. I’ve been able to create a few web applications in this area as well, including a server monitor and a bad language auto-kicker (very useful!).
