My name is Barney Boisvert. I am a software craftsman. Most people would say I’m a programmer, software developer, or software architect but I feel all of those titles are inaccurate. My primary focus is been building JVM-hosted server applications with rich web interfaces centered around turning people’s data into information. I’ve been building software professionally since 1999 when I realized staying in college was the wrong choice for me (personally and financially). I currently live in Sherwood, OR, about 15 miles SW of downtown Portland, along with Lindsay (daughter) and Emery (son).
Bio
Barney Boisvert is a Principal Software Engineer for ARMUS Corporation in San Mateo, CA. He has been developing Java, Groovy and CFML software for over 20 years in a wide range of industries, from crisis communication management to data mining and business intelligence. He has a passion for problem solving and software design and has produced several frameworks as well as contributing to existing projects (including Hibernate, Groovy, ColdSpring, and Liquibase). He lives in Portland, Oregon with his two kids and can often be found building LEGO machines or playing soccer. You can find him online at https://github.com/barneyb/, http://programmerluddite.com/ or tweeting at @barneyb.
This Site
I created this site to partially replace barneyb.com, which has been my sole home for the past decade. That site has grown into a monster with several WordPress blogs, a whole pile of CFML applications, and a history which doesn’t point where I’ve ended up. I had originally conceived of this site in 2009, but didn’t get around to actually materializing it until December 2011. This site is hosted with WordPress, in my opinion the best blogging platform available. This coming from a “strong disliker” of PHP. However, it’s ubiquity and community make it the obvious choice. I hack up some PHP when WordPress (and it’s myriad plugins) don’t do exactly what I want, but in general I use it pretty much out of the box. The installation actually hosts a number of different blogs on various domains which I maintain for myself and my family. I don’t publish a directory of them. The header image is a longhand version of well-known sorting algorithm, expressed using Groovy syntax. If you’ve taken undergrad CS courses, you can probably identify it without any difficulty, even though much of it is out of focus. The pen in the background was crafted by Chris Peterson.
Other Aliases
I try to keep my online identity as narrow as possible. However, that’s not always possible with over 7 billion other people in the world consuming unique usernames. Where I can’t use ‘barneyb’ (e.g., barneyb.com), I usually use ‘bboisvert’ (e.g., bboisvert@gmail.com), and occasionally ‘barneyboisvert’. In the past couple years there seems to have been a proliferation of other ‘barneyb’s in the world, but I remain the tallest and furriest. Probably.