I began my college career with a deep interest in what makes individuals tick. I pursued a degree in psychology for two years and learned the basic terminology and frameworks to better understand how people develop their basic beliefs, but the science was too soft for the answers I was seeking. This coincided with a renewed popularity in the works of Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson as breakthroughs in neuroscience changed our understanding of the "hardware" that human "software" runs on. I added a major in biology hoping to learn about the brain as a means of understanding the beings they control.

During an unplanned, low-GPA-related "sabbatical," ... I began working in a bookstore. There I found existentialism , predicate logic, and ethical philosophy in the quietest, dustiest corners of the store. The way I thought about and understood everything was fundamentally altered forever. Predicate logic was the mathematics of language, existentialism explored "being," and ethics explored the implications of our actions as beings. Epistemology scrutinized knowledge, metaphysics questioned reality, and philosophy of religion offered an honest assessment of religious belief. I WAS IN LOVE! I returned to school as a philosophy major with a passion. Unfortunately, after my first year of upper division coursework, my university dropped philosophy as a major. I was left adrift, unsure where to go next. Around this time I read Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and decided it was time to take some version "The Hero's Journey" myself.

I worked hard, saved money, and moved to Portland, Oregon. I excelled in my retail management career, met my hot ass wife, and started looking back to school to move into the next phase of my life. I could finish my degree in philosophy, but my career potential was limited to being the most highly educated retail manager alive and earning a fairly low salary. While doing the practice questions in my logic textbook as a fun pastime (Nerd Alert!), the seed of an idea began to grow; I realized computer science would give me an opportunity to leverage a background in logic, science, and problem-solving toward a degree with earning potential that wouldn't eventually bore me intellectually.

With almost four years' worth of credits already, I assumed I'd be out with a degree in no time. I WAS VERY WRONG. It took more than three years of full course loads, summer classes, and retaking credits to finally earn my degree. I could not have done it without the support of my wife. As a student in my thirties, I managed to make it through the "survival of the fittest" approach to teaching lower division CS, the all-nighters to debug programs, and the calculus/physics that I hadn't touched in more than 10 years. Despite my long road, I have finally found something I excel at and enjoy. I maintained a place on the Dean's List and President's List for high honors throughout my time at Portland State. Finally, after 15 years, I had 280-ish credits, a 3.7 GPA, insight into how people work, arcane knowledge about "Being and Time" , the tools to code anything, and a magic piece of paper that opens the doors to my future. Continue Reading

I was always an active kid. Growing up in Boise, Idaho, (ACTUAL Boise) we rode bikes everywhere, hiked the foothills when we were bored, and skiied in the winter. Home video game consoles were gaining popularity, but those were for rainy weekends and required renting the games and console. I worked on my grandmother's ranch over many weekends and summers and learned the true meaning of hard work. General fitness was just built into my way of life. However, I was always a string bean no matter how many hay bales I lifted or miles I mountainbiked.

I idolized Schwarzenegger and Stalone, loved Hulk Hogan, and would watch in wonder at the reruns of World's Strongest Man. I fully accepted that I would not look like them, but I was stronger than I appeared ... from ranch work ("farm strong" is real) and an active lifestyle. Maybe, with work, I could be one strong-ass string bean. I got my hands on "Bodybuilding: The Weider Approach" by Joe Weider. I learned about rep ranges, set ranges, and how to structure workouts for progression. I would go to the YMCA with my mom to put my new knowledge into practice. Luckily, the workouts made for mass monsters fueled by anabolics were just about perfect for a pubescent teen: moderate weight, high reps, no recovery time.

I would go through phases of varying dedication through my teens and twenties, often motivated by vanity more than anything. Then, I traded the P90-X and bodybuilding routines for powerlifting. I was obsessed with the tangible progress that powerlifting offered. Intellectually, there had to be a perfect plan in place to incrementally increase weight and make projections for hitting the biggest lifts. Physically, it allowed me to put every bit of myself into something and get measurable results. Sometimes you give everything you've got to achieve a goal and for one reason or another things just don't go your way, with powerlifting the work you put in directly correlates to the things you achieve. The gym became my church. When nothing else made sense in life, I could always go there and get out what I put in.

In 2017, I had a devastating knee injury leaving me partially paralyzed that required multiple surgeries and LOTS of physical therapy. Instead of ending my lifting career, it deepened my love for strength sports. All the tools and mental tricks I used to improve my weightlifting translated into recovery. I set my goals and worked toward them incrementally with a focus on doing the best I was capable of safely, without over-reaching. I went from a 500lb deadlift to carefully lifting an empty bar. I focused on my form as I re-learned how to walk. I pushed through pain to get my body where I knew it could go. I can tell you that today I'm stronger than I ever was before and you'd never guess I have any kind of disability thanks to the mindset developed lifting weights.

Just as they helped me through hardship, the principles for improving in the gym are helpful in coding. What is practicing algroithms but learning the correct form so you don't waste energy or break your shit? Are reps and sets not an iterative approach? Isn't there a waterfall model inherent in deciding a fitness goal, designing a routine, going to the gym, hitting your goals, then maintining your new fitness level? The carryover has helped me practice every day, put in my reps, and improve my coding and knowledge to be the best developer/engineer I can be. Continue Reading

I can't begin to describe how thankful I am for my dead-end road to being a philosopher. Three years of examining everything in excruciating detail and questioning everything we "know" about the world altered me forever. It was extremely tedious, and many times it felt like my brain had been turned inside out, but once you've pulled back the curtain on science, knowledge, religion, ethics, being, and time, you see that nothing is a concrete as we take it to be.

If you've taken a physics course, you may have learned that the only reason we don't pass right through the ground is not due to earth being "solid" but from the electrostatic force. In truth, you have never actually physically touched any of the solid objects you interact with. If you've learned this, you either don't care because it doesn't change anything about your life, or you start to question other parts of our perception of reality. Philosophy bombards you with these instances and even if you try to toss them away as semantic games, a pile of reasons that our reality and objective reality don't quite match grows ... , festers, and becomes impossible to ignore. However, we are better off when we know that we don't know than when we are ignorant to our ignorance. In the words of Socrates in Plato's Republic :

Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.

Luckily, philosophy also provides a way to navigate this abyss with logic. You begin to rebuild what you "know", what you believe, and what you want from the world starting from a priori to a posteriori, from deductive to inductive, all while understanding your own limitations in understanding. Statements and sentiments can be examined in a mathematical way with formal logic to uncover meaning (Sound familiar CS kids? Ever built an interpreter?), achieve sound reasoning at the very least, and determine "truth" at the very best. .

There is also a beautiful, almost poetic side of philosophy. My favorite book of all time is Thus Spoke Zarathustra for precisely this reason. Existential and ethical philosophers pondering the questions that all of us ponder and creating thought experiments or stories for us to dissociate and examine our own thoughts is as stirring to me as the best literature ever written. Imagine the same gut-punch or insight that an extremely apt metaphor provides extended and examined over an entire essay or whole book and you begin to see the emotional impact good philosophy provides. Some will reach for scripture to reach enlightenment in the face of life challenges, I reach for the existential philosophy. It may not feel uplifting to be told there is no purpose, fate, or meaning at first pass, but it is certainly empowering and grounding to believe that existence preceeds essence and we have the power to make ourselves into something greater, create meaning, and determine our own values. Without the barriers of fate, we can become anything we choose to be. Continue Reading