San Jose, California, USA
Ian has had parallel interests since grade school in computing and flight. He was coding on Unix before there was Linux, and started on Linux 6 months after the kernel was posted. He has a masters degree in Computer Science and is a CSSLP (Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional). On the side he's a pilot and a certified flight instructor. As a licensed Ham Radio operator, experimentation with electronics evolved over the years to include the Raspberry Pi and Arduino. When outdoors he enjoys bicycling, hiking and photography.
More info about Ian is at ikluft.github.io .
Authored Comments
I should add... about learning programming languages for more tools in your toolbox, you get to choose for yourself. Pick ones you like. I like Perl because it's very powerful and lets me seem to work magic.
Thanks. Let me try to encourage you a bit. My experience with the Perl community in Silicon Valley says people of all ages are still choosing to learn Perl for either professional or personal reasons. Everyone is outnumbered these days because there is no majority programming language. Don't listen to the negativity because mud-slinging is so cheap these days - yet no one has the high ground. Programming languages are like tools in a toolbox in that it's useful to have more than one anyway. So tolerance is a good thing, as with many things in life. For any given language, it matters most that it has ongoing development and a feature/library set that is useful to you. Perl has ongoing development and a lively Open Source community that still serves as a model others imitate. There is a specific style and steep learning curve because of the way Perl assembled features under the philosophy of "there's more than one way to do it", because of Larry Wall's background as a linguist. But the ability to appear to work magic with the results still speaks for itself. Enjoy!