Alan Huey

[Alan Huey]

Greetings,
I am not new here, but I am back from a long absence. I originally joined the AAW Forum in January, 2010. Day Job, family health issues, etc. have kept me pretty occupied. My wife and I relocated to North Carolina from California in 2018. I have spent my career in production agriculture, food processing and the fresh produce industry. I started turning when I was about 9 years old when my father bought a wood lathe and we started messing with it. We moved a few times and because my father wasn't too interested after all, this wound up covered up in the back of the garage unused for many years. But I was hooked. I took a long break until I was well on my own, and bought my own lathe in the late 1990's (Finally!). I learned a lot from folks on the AAW Forum, and several books, DVD's, and once YouTube came of age there too. Like many, I turned lots of pens, bowls, boxes, pepper and salt mills and such. Initially, I used wood turning as a way to unwind from the stresses of the day job then ultimately as side hustle that has kept me pretty busy to this day. I think I keep getting better, but then I look at some of the work that is posted here, and I wonder. There are a lot of you here that put my work to shame. Seriously. But I am happy to be back and now have much more time to stay engaged. I am looking forward to getting reacquainted and getting to know you all better. Happy Turning!

 

[Jim Reynolds]

Welcome back. Turn for the joy of doing so.

 

[Gerald Lawrence]

Welcome back and we do like pictures

 

[John K Jordan]

Hello Alan! Or should I say hello neighbor (practically!) I’ve been to and through Wake Forest over the years. (We lived in Kernersville in the ‘70s)

I think I keep getting better, but then I look at some of the work that is posted here, and I wonder. There are a lot of you here that put my work to shame

Hey, there is no room for shame in woodturning, just differences! From the perspective of any turner in the world there is always someone both further up and down the mental scale we put in our own heads, making something more or less interesting. But I think it’s all good!

JKJ

 

[Kent Reisdorph]

Welcome back, Alan.

 

[David Wyke]

Welcome back, let me know if you’re ever in the western part of the state.

 

[John K Jordan]

Welcome back, let me know if you’re ever in the western part of the state.

Hey, this makes me want to see a map with dots showing where people live! Zoom in an click on a dot for a profile. Anyone want to code this in their spare time? We've gotten off the I40 exit there.

JKJ

 

[David Wyke]

Hey, this makes me want to see a map with dots showing where people live! Zoom in an click on a dot for a profile. Anyone want to code this in their spare time? We've gotten off the I40 exit there.

JKJ

I like that idea! I’ve by your area many times in the past. I did a lot of work with Lockheed Martin in Lexington Kentucky

 

[Alan Weinberg]

Good to see you spell “Alan” correctly! Welcome back.

 

[Brian Gustin]

Hey, this makes me want to see a map with dots showing where people live! Zoom in an click on a dot for a profile. Anyone want to code this in their spare time? We've gotten off the I40 exit there.

JKJ

Easy enough to do with Google Maps, just needs someone with access to member database to populate it. (Or, create a public map and have folks add their own pins - it'd be a voluntary map deal.)

 

[John K Jordan]

Easy enough to do with Google Maps, just needs someone with access to member database to populate it. (Or, create a public map and have folks add their own pins - it'd be a voluntary map deal.)

There's one like that in the accordion world for the dwindling dealers and technicians, but it seems to be poorly populated and updated.

 

[Jon Rista]

Welcome back, Alan! I understand when your life takes over, and you have no time to do the things you love. Just got back into woodturning this year, after a couple of years where I hardly had time to do any. Hope you are able to move the needle on your work. I think in the long run, it just takes time, practice, and pushing that envelope a little bit every day. I'm no great turner, but I think I get a little bit better every day. Ten years from now, maybe I'll be making pieces someone like you says a nice thing about.

 

[Kent Reisdorph]

Hey, this makes me want to see a map with dots showing where people live! Zoom in an click on a dot for a profile. Anyone want to code this in their spare time? We've gotten off the I40 exit there.

JKJ

That would be a nice addition to the site. I'd have a look, but I was never a Web developer. C++ and C# here.

 

[John K Jordan]

That would be a nice addition to the site. I'd have a look, but I was never a Web developer. C++ and C# here.

Hey same here! I got started with assembly language, then learned basic. Then pascal, fortran, and C for work plus a few others like ADA for special projects (and you'd might be surprised at how many calls I got from the business side of things for help with Excel macros!) But when we needed web development we hired someone. My brain was too full.

At work I did most of my 15 years of software dev in C combined with Visual Basic to develop quick prototypes. I was able to take a C++ class at Microsoft headquarters when classes were still open to non-Microsoft employees. I found C++ interesting but basically seemed like a way to help people use some of the robust programming techniques I'd been using for years. Never used C#. I wrote a lot of boring software analytical software for the Dept of Energy and some that was a lot more fun for military and Dept of Transportation projects. Lots of travel.

The most baffling programming I ever worked on was for the incredible Datacube real-time image processing hardware.

Datacube Inc. - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

We used the Datacube hardware as the inspection core for a project to create a material handling and inspection system for a major manufacturor of ceramic circuit boards for aerospace use. I first wrote a simulator in independent modules then substituted the real hardware as they were devloped. Good fun!

What kind of software did you do (or still do?)

JKJ

 

[Kent Reisdorph]

Sorry for hijacking your thread, Alan.

I was a commodity futures broker for 15 years. I switched to a career in programming in 1996. C++ was my bread and butter and my first love, but C# is a superior language for 98% of developers out there. It's just so much cleaner and easier than C++. I've been a manager of some sort for the past 20 years. I've done a little coding of my own stuff, but they don't let me touch production code. 🤣

I started my career working for a company that made 3rd party tools for Borland compilers (primarily for Borland Delphi). In 2002 I moved to Las Vegas to work for Aristocrat, a slot machine manufacturer. Left there and worked for a mobile game company. Long story short, I'm back at Aristocrat, making the world a better place one slot machine at a time. Joking, of course. There is nothing socially redeemable in the work I do. I've dabbled in Python, Lua (which I hate), a fair bit of Delphi, Unity, and I can write SQL at a basic level. I spent about a month on assembly on the 6502 and then decided that I didn't need to be down there twiddling bits.

Datacube looks interesting.

 

[Jon Rista]

Hey same here! I got started with assembly language, then learned basic. Then pascal, fortran, and C for work plus a few others like ADA for special projects (and you'd might be surprised at how many calls I got from the business side of things for help with Excel macros!) But when we needed web development we hired someone. My brain was too full.

At work I did most of my 15 years of software dev in C combined with Visual Basic to develop quick prototypes. I was able to take a C++ class at Microsoft headquarters when classes were still open to non-Microsoft employees. I found C++ interesting but basically seemed like a way to help people use some of the robust programming techniques I'd been using for years. Never used C#. I wrote a lot of boring software analytical software for the Dept of Energy and some that was a lot more fun for military and Dept of Transportation projects. Lots of travel.

The most baffling programming I ever worked on was for the incredible Datacube real-time image processing hardware.

Datacube Inc. - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

We used the Datacube hardware as the inspection core for a project to create a material handling and inspection system for a major manufacturor of ceramic circuit boards for aerospace use. I first wrote a simulator in independent modules then substituted the real hardware as they were devloped. Good fun!

What kind of software did you do (or still do?)

JKJ

You would like C#. I did C++ in the 90s, and I always hated memory management (I'm sure you can understand why!) I started C# in the very end of the 90s, and did C# for 14 years. The language is wonderfully designed, and I enjoyed working with a well crafted GC so I didn't have to deal with memory management.

The last 10+ years, I've done mostly JavaScript development, in the form of TypeScript. Anders Hejlsberg, the language designer for C#, is also the designer of TypeScript. So I am quite at home, and use TS pretty much everywhere (web, servers, mobile, JSON even for data a lot of the time, etc.) If I have to, I fall back to C# for more concrete server work (although, I've fallen out of love with the Microsoft ecosystem....yick, too darn heavy! And they can never seem to stick with their products, constantly aborting them and creating new, but similar, ones with different names...meh.) Most of my server work these days is Nest.js.

Way back in the 80s, when I was still a kid, my first programming language was Pascal. I did some lower level programming with that, often with embedded assembly sections. Man, I haven't touched assembly in such a long time. Those were fun times, though...directly instructing the CPU EXACTLY what you wanted it to do! Kind of miss those days...

 

[John K Jordan]

Man, I haven't touched assembly in such a long time. Those were fun times, though...directly instructing the CPU EXACTLY what you wanted it to do! Kind of miss those days...

When I bought my first computer kit it came with one program - printed paper sheets with the hex code for a tick-tac-toe game. From that I learned to turn the binary into assembly language and make some changes. I bought an editor/assembler software package on TTY punched tape which took about 30 minutes just to load. (one error and start over) A few years later, I disassembled an early SubLogic binary to see how they handled matrix math in 6800 assembly and wrote code to display a simple geometric 3D "world" on a CRT monitor and move the viewpoint with joysticks. I think I was the first guy on my block with dual 8" floppy disks. Later, when prices went down you could buy a 10MB hard drive for just $1000 - ooh, unlimited data storage! Yes, kinda miss those days.

My wife thought she had married a maniac. She was prob right.

 

[Kent Reisdorph]

You would like C#. I did C++ in the 90s, and I always hated memory management (I'm sure you can understand why!) I started C# in the very end of the 90s, and did C# for 14 years. The language is wonderfully designed, and I enjoyed working with a well crafted GC so I didn't have to deal with memory management.

The last 10+ years, I've done mostly JavaScript development, in the form of TypeScript. Anders Hejlsberg, the language designer for C#, is also the designer of TypeScript. So I am quite at home, and use TS pretty much everywhere (web, servers, mobile, JSON even for data a lot of the time, etc.) If I have to, I fall back to C# for more concrete server work (although, I've fallen out of love with the Microsoft ecosystem....yick, too darn heavy! And they can never seem to stick with their products, constantly aborting them and creating new, but similar, ones with different names...meh.) Most of my server work these days is Nest.js.

Way back in the 80s, when I was still a kid, my first programming language was Pascal. I did some lower level programming with that, often with embedded assembly sections. Man, I haven't touched assembly in such a long time. Those were fun times, though...directly instructing the CPU EXACTLY what you wanted it to do! Kind of miss those days...

Anders was also the brains behind Borland Delphi. People in the US look down on Delphi, but it's a great dev environment (it's more popular in Europe). It's technically Object Pascal, but everyone just calls it Delphi. I used TypeScript for a little bit when integrating Scaleform with Unreal.

When I worked for TurboPower (tools company), our code was littered with ASM sections so I know what you mean. I agree with MS tools getting overly heavy. Unfortunately companies like Borland (Inprise now) gave away the compiler market to an inferior product in Visual Studio. Borland did themselves in, but the old "You can't get fired for buying Microsoft" definitely was a factor.

 

[Kent Reisdorph]

When I bought my first computer kit it came with one program - printed paper sheets with the hex code for a tick-tac-toe game. From that I learned to turn the binary into assembly language and make some changes. I bought an editor/assembler software package on TTY punched tape which took about 30 minutes just to load. (one error and start over) A few years later, I disassembled an early SubLogic binary to see how they handled matrix math in 6800 assembly and wrote code to display a simple geometric 3D "world" on a CRT monitor and move the viewpoint with joysticks. I think I was the first guy on my block with dual 8" floppy disks. Later, when prices went down you could buy a 10MB hard drive for just $1000 - ooh, unlimited data storage! Yes, kinda miss those days.

My wife thought she had married a maniac. She was prob right.

I bought that 10MB hard drive. Remember at the time we thought we couldn't possibly use 10MB of disk space? I also remember paying $500 for a floppy drive for the Atari 800.

 

[Jon Rista]

Anders was also the brains behind Borland Delphi. People in the US look down on Delphi, but it's a great dev environment (it's more popular in Europe). It's technically Object Pascal, but everyone just calls it Delphi. I used TypeScript for a little bit when integrating Scaleform with Unreal.

When I worked for TurboPower (tools company), our code was littered with ASM sections so I know what you mean. I agree with MS tools getting overly heavy. Unfortunately companies like Borland (Inprise now) gave away the compiler market to an inferior product in Visual Studio. Borland did themselves in, but the old "You can't get fired for buying Microsoft" definitely was a factor.

Aye! I also used Delphi. I started in Pascal (Turbo Pascal, also Borland), but used Delphi for a while before I moved into C++. I'm a big fan of Anders. His languages are very well designed.

I used Visual Studio since the 90s. Its not bad as an IDE, and after...heck, 20+ years now I guess, I'm quite familiar with it. Its more the approach Microsoft takes to products, hosting, development (builds in particular)...its all just so HEAVY! After over a decade working in web technologies, and using JS/TS extensively throughout the entire vertical stack, I've really come to appreciate the very lightweight nature of it, the lightweight tooling, the composability of tooling on the Posix terminal, etc. I'm a huge fan of lightweight development these days.

 

[Charles Cadenhead]

Sorry for hijacking your thread, Alan.

I was a commodity futures broker for 15 years. I switched to a career in programming in 1996. C++ was my bread and butter and my first love, but C# is a superior language for 98% of developers out there. It's just so much cleaner and easier than C++. I've been a manager of some sort for the past 20 years. I've done a little coding of my own stuff, but they don't let me touch production code. 🤣

I started my career working for a company that made 3rd party tools for Borland compilers (primarily for Borland Delphi). In 2002 I moved to Las Vegas to work for Aristocrat, a slot machine manufacturer. Left there and worked for a mobile game company. Long story short, I'm back at Aristocrat, making the world a better place one slot machine at a time. Joking, of course. There is nothing socially redeemable in the work I do. I've dabbled in Python, Lua (which I hate), a fair bit of Delphi, Unity, and I can write SQL at a basic level. I spent about a month on assembly on the 6502 and then decided that I didn't need to be down there twiddling bits.

Datacube looks interesting.

@Kent, did you hear that CISA and the FBI want developers to stop coding in C and C++?

 

[Darryn Achall]

That would be a nice addition to the site. I'd have a look, but I was never a Web developer. C++ and C# here.

I write web app code frequently in C#. Using Blazor on webassembly your C# code will run in a browser.

 

[Kent Reisdorph]

@Kent, did you hear that CISA and the FBI want developers to stop coding in C and C++?

I hadn't, but I guess I'm not surprised.

 

[Kent Reisdorph]

I write web app code frequently in C#. Using Blazor on webassembly your C# code will run in a browser.

We have an old Web UI for one of our products that uses Angular.js (the old one). We will likely rewrite that in Blazor/C# before long.