About Me

Hi, I'm Oran Looney. Call me Oran. My e-mail address is the output of this Python script:

print r'%(name)s@%(domain)s.%(type)s' % \
      dict(name='olooney',domain='gmail',type='com')

Programming

I love programming. With code, the idea is the form. As soon as you've fully expressed your ideas, they become real. Mathematicians and philosophers never get that feedback: their ideas stay ideas. Scientists and architects do realize their ideas, but only months or years later. For me, the tight feedback loop is what makes programming so enjoyable.

I didn't discover that I was meant to be a programmer until relatively late in life. Before that, I bummed around colleges, picking up masters' degrees in both math and physics, coding and reading philosophy in my spare time, and generally immersing myself in the tradition of rational thought. So, I had a number of career paths open to me upon graduation, and after a lot of thought I chose programming. It was the right decision: work and play became one, to the betterment of both.

Sci-Fi

I used to dream about writing science fiction. I had the "science" part down, but the "fiction" didn't go so well. (Somehow, a detailed discussion of the practical challenges of interstellar travel isn't as interesting as space cowboys roping star-cows with laser lassos.) Now I write these essays. I imagine I'll write a technical book or two once I reach my prime.

Pragmatic Craftsmanship

I like to say that my programming speciality is "pragmatic." I'm still a novice, but the mix of skills I'm evolving towards is definitely that of the software craftsman described in The Pragmatic Programmer.

Recently I've been thinking about software engineering a lot. I've seen that using the right approach on a project makes all the difference in the world, and the meta-problem of choosing a good approach for a given project seems interesting.

Bio

I'm married to the most beautiful girl in the world. Karen and I live in Madison, Wisconsin, where she was studying at the UW until her recent graduation. Wisconsin is gorgeous six (not contiguous) months out of the year, and perfect for staying inside and programming the other six.

I never went to high school: I enrolled in a computer programming class at the local community college when I was 13, the summer after I finished junior high, and just kind of stuck around. By age 16 I had an associates of science degree and was off to college. When I tell this story, people tend to fall into one of two camps: either they say that I was lucky because high school is such a waste of time, or they say I'm unlucky because I never got to socialize with my peers. So I guess no one feels they learned anything much in their high school classes, which is kind of sad.

Interests

I read a lot. A quick count of the number of computer books on my shelf shows I read about one a month. Beyond that, I maintain a layman's interest in evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. I read a lot of philosophy as a grad student, but gave it up before it did any permanent damage.

I like computer languages; I've written a couple toy languages, and am interested in the many young languages out there. I believe the future of software is multi-language applications, with core functionality in optimized machine code and the UI and other high level functionality in script. I'm heavily into Python, and would like to explore the Boost library more thoroughly.

I have the unfortunate tendency to lecture. Recently I've tried to direct that urge towards these essays instead of inflicting myself upon friends and family.

I like data organization: file systems, serialization, SQL, XML schema, JSON, and so on. Organizing data for storage and retrieval is currently the largest unsolved problem in computer science — the limits of modern file systems and databases are painfully obvious, but it's not clear yet how to improve them. I don't have any general solutions to offer, but I try to understand the tradeoffs for my own designs and keep an eye on developments in this field.

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