In The Beginning

I have been contemplating starting a blog for some time now. It seems like a great way to selfishly promote myself and by that I mean pretend that other people care what I have to say. Neither of the two statements above are true, but they sound funny, in my mind anyway. The reality is that I need to practice my communication skills and I need a place to vent the random thoughts perpetrating my brain. Ready? GO!!

Welcome to my cathartic medium. My name is Shawn Pfister. I am currently employed as an embedded software engineer for Allworx. I make VoIP phones and telephony servers do cool stuff. I am approaching this blog like a software project utilizing agile methods of development, hence the name Agile Rants. I don't know where this is going yet. I need to run through a few "iterations" to figure that out. Ultimately, I hope to have history of my progress as a writer. I suspect that you will find grammatical errors sprinkled throughout the blog. While that might irritate the Grammar Police, I don't care. This element of the blog is also agile. I will correct them as I find them, but the whole point of this log is to improve my writing skills, so expect some mistakes. Hopefully, as this blog evolves the frequency of errors is reduced. I will try to write at least one entry a week. Sometimes there will be more. Hopefully, there will never be less. Some posts will be about software development perhaps some epiphanies that I discover as I become a better developer or perhaps a vent or two about the ludacris posts on programmers.se. Other posts will most definitely cover my personal biases about politic and how I feel about current events. Maybe some day I will create another blog that is more professional, but for now this a playground for my mind. With that said, expect my opinions on things to change as I formalize my ideas much in the same way design or requirements document changes as new things are discovered or certain approaches are learned to not work well. This is an exploration and hopefully I come out better on the other side.