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27 December 2019

My name is Owen Thomas. I'm Australian.

One day in 1987, I picked up a TI/994a home computer collecting dust in a cupboard. I plugged it in, turned it on, and got it to do something I didn't think was smart enough to understand. From there, I quickly gravitated to C on an 8088 XT that was purchased as a birthday present the next year; an expensive gift that sent me on my way.

I started using NetBeans in 2008 around the time I began implementing a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a personal project of mine.

Previous to July 2008 I worked for IBM, Accenture, my alma mater, and the NSW Police in their computerised records keeping department. Since July 2008, I have been working exclusively on the PoC.

I am using NetBeans to develop my PoC in Java SE. Apart from the SE API, my project uses no other third-party libraries. I have so far kept my development effort small and simple.

I particularly wanted an IDE that would allow me to aggressively refactor when necessary. Before I started implementing my PoC, I had plenty of software development experience, and had realised that without being able to aggressively refactor, one's code can become entrenched in perpetuating structures that are the subject of historical ignorance. I didn't want my development progress to be slowed by my historical ignorance. At $0, NetBeans is very affordable, and I found that when I did some initial comparison with other freely available IDEs, NetBeans came out as being the most helpful and intuitive and non-judgemental.

I have been developing on a series of laptops, most from Dell. Recently, I have been investigating what will be necessary to deploy to an Android phone.

I use Git for code base version control although, as I'm the only developer, Git is serving merely as a way to manage code provenance. I do not store my code on GitHub or other third-party managed code repository.

My email is a good place to reach me. Or my phone number.

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