About

Welcome

My name is James Kellams and I am an amateur programmer.  Other than a FORTRAN course as part of my engineering studies track in college, I had no formal training in programming.  Most of what I know was gained by self-learning and emulating "professional" programmers; especially operating systems coders and game coders.  I am old enough to remember the days when most computers had less than 32K of memory and no hard-disks.  I admired those who learned to squeeze performance from these early machines using very efficient code and often resorting to tricks and hacks.  That is why I admire game programmers today.  For the most part they seem to pride themselves on squeezing every ounce of performance they can from today's computer systems.

My purpose for this blog is to explore some of these techniques and write about and demonstrate them.  My intended audience is other amateur and hobbyist coders who love coding, compiling, running and appreciate watching their code work.  Also, for those who are willing to explore new ideas, fail, and learn from the experience.  I intend to present these techniques in the form of projects or a series of posts, working step-by-step through the algorithms and modules and learning what I can.  I am not incredibly original.  I am on a mission to learn, so I will be looking at similar projects by other programmers and I will be using many of the ideas they present and discuss.  I will welcome any and all comments that do not violate PG-13 standards.  I will delete all spam.

About Me

I am currently employed as an Automation Engineer for a large manufacturer.  I specialize in real-time control and process automation systems.  I have been writing code for these systems since the 1980s.  In my spare time, I teach, coach and judge competitive high-school debate.  During the off-season, I write hobby code for games, astronomy, and pure enjoyment.  I love coding for fun. That's all there is to it.