Starting out again

Hi, my name is Alex, I'm a 24 year old software developer living in Vancouver. I created this blog because I wanted to start developing something I'm interested in and thought it would be good to chronicle my progresses. To be honest, I'm writing mostly for myself and will be surprised if anyone actually starts reading this regularly. If that become you, then thanks and let me know!

I've been out of university for about 2 years now, still feels like it hasn't been nearly that long. Out of university after a little traveling I got offered a nice position at a large company with a generous salary except that it was in QA Development. This means I develop testing automation software but also have to test manually when. Basically I end up splitting my time between the two and it has had it's challenges and can be interesting but doesn't really leave me feeling fulfilled as a developer.

After working there for a while, I found myself putting aside my personal development projects. I'd still keep up with technology and sometimes read up on the interesting things I encountered at work but this isn't even. I've given my head a shake and now it's time to do something I want to do. The plan here is to pick a project, think of where I want to take it then dice it into pieces and work on it.
Since I like to work on things that I personally would find useful or fun I decided that I will create a software representation of the card game Bang! as it seems like a good thing to get those programming muscles working the way I want them to again. You can see more info about it here and as the wiki article states, it's an interesting application of game theory.

So, I hope you'll look forward to growing with me as I take on this new challenge. I'm going to start on the first and smallest problem in my next post: The card shuffle - To approximate true random or to approximate human random.