About Me
Hello, I’m Michael Keeling. I live in Pittsburgh, PA with my wife where I am a graduate student working on my Master in Software Engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Because I’m so busy with studies, I share joint custody of my awesome dog, with my Mom.
Before amassing tons of debt by going back to school I worked for Black Knight Technology based out of Fredericksburg, VA. One of the coolest projects I worked on at Black Knight was Chameleon, a highly automatable, general purpose data analysis tool I created. It’s a free download so you can check it out if you want.
I am a founder of The Daily Quaker!, a blog centered around the famous HA! HA! Guy meme. The Daily Quaker! is home of another invention of mine, the HA! HA! Guy Whiteboard: the best online whiteboard impulse buy you will ever make! I’ve been selling HA! HA! Guy Whiteboards since 2006.
Since this blog is mostly about software engineering I suppose it makes sense to share a little bit about my history with computers. I was first introduced to programming on my family’s Commodore 64 when I was maybe four years old. Sure, Tooth Invaders and Ernie’s Magic Shapes were just slap in cartridges, but to play the really cool games (like Dr. J vs Larry Bird), I had to learn some BASIC. I was introduced to C in the ninth grade but I didn’t pick up a compiler again until my sophomore year of college when I decided to take an intro CS course. From that point on I knew I had found my calling. I graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2003 with a degree in Computer Science.
For more information, see my professional resume.
Why have a blog?
I was afraid I was losing my ability to think critically about what I read on the web. I’m a long time reader of both Coding Horror and Joel on Software, picking each up around the same time in late 2004. These websites, among others, are excellent and entertaining resources but recently, for me, they’ve become a form of mindless entertainment in which I found myself unquestionably agreeing with most of what the authors had to say. I decided that I needed to gain a better understanding of what I actually thought of software and technology and not what other people thought.
Also, since I left my job to become a grad student, I thought that maintaining a blog would be an easy way to record what I was learning at school and to chart my professional growth over time. By publishing my thoughts on the web, I thought perhaps others might benefit from what I have learned and written.
What is Never Let Down?
Never let down is a phrase coined by one of my favorite musicians, Andrew W.K. in the song “Got To Do It” from his I Get Wet album. You can listen to the whole song on his website.
To me, “Never Let Down” is a life philosophy, a way of thinking about how I interact with the world. Never letting down means working as hard as I can, as long as I can, on whatever it is that makes me happy and being satisfied with what I accomplish because I know I did the best I was capable of doing. Plus it’s just an awesome song.