A brief introduction

Hi! My name is Keith Walters and welcome to my new blog at keen-software.com. For me, there are several benefits to managing a blog. First, it pushes me to practice writing which is a skill that I will need for the rest of my professional life. Being a software engineer requires more than writing code. I am constantly communicating with managers and coworkers via email, writing test procedures, and proposals and reports. Writing is something that I avoided in college for lazy/stupid reasons and now it is time I improved this neglected skill.

The second reason is I can treat it like a journal to record my frustrations and epiphanies that I will have while working on various projects. This blog can act as a log that I can search through to find solutions to a problem I solved in the past, or to remind me why I went with tool A over tool B for a particular task. And who knows, maybe someone else out there will find my posts useful as well.

For a little background on myself, I am a recent college graduate (class of ‘06) from Penn State Behrend’s Software Engineering program and I’m now employed at Adaptive Methods working on software for the United States Navy. Our products are written in C, C++, and Java for the Linux environment. Before I graduated college I worked for a small ISV called Distributed Network Software that develops and maintains N-tier web applications for several small businesses using Microsoft’s .Net framework and C#. So even though I haven’t been working in the industry for very long, I do have some experience developing applications in multiple environments using a variety of tools and languages.

You can expect my posts and articles will relate to topics that I am very interested in, such as:

  • Languages: C/C++, C#, Java, Python
  • Test driven development
  • Discussions on Best Practices
  • Cross platform development
  • Robotics/embedded programming
  • Industry related technical books

My goal is to post something at least once a week (mostly on my personal blog) so I hope you check back often. Or better yet, add my subscription link to your rss feed reader.