I am Sponge, or SpongBong. Self-taught full-stack developer, IT technician, analyst, computer scientist. Right now I am studying, freelancing, researching, and looking for work, and building prototypes and services along the way to get me where I need to be.

I started early and never really stopped, which is the list in the panel next to this one. The most recent entry is my own language and the compiler for it, which is the kind of thing you take on once the layer underneath stops being scary.

A college professor once told me programmers are some of the laziest people around, and I have carried it ever since. Not that they will not do the work. A programmer's whole job is finding the way that takes less of it, and then never doing the old way again. It is why they hold up so many industries without anyone noticing. Getting a computer to send someone to Mars and back is a lot easier than learning to fly the rocket yourself.

The other thing I stand by: everything is open source if you understand binary. Source you were not given is not source you cannot read.

What I actually love is automation, databases, and picking data apart. I am a living, breathing data processor. I once wrote an A* pathfinder into a file search and tree tool, and it beats find and tree on my own machine, which nobody asked me to do and I am still pleased about. Before that I spent a long time on private game servers, rewriting databases to change how the game itself worked and to add items that were never in it, and then wrote a set of programs to do the whole job from a few rules instead of by hand. That is the shape of most of what I build.

Something I will complain about unprompted: antivirus and anti-cheat. Both are good ideas. Antivirus still misses things it has no business missing, and most anti-cheat runs at kernel level while plenty of people walk straight around it. If that many can get past it, that many can turn it into kernel access on someone else's machine. You have shipped the hole you were trying to close.

No degree. I have a lot to show instead, and I can prove what I know without a slip of paper claiming it for me. I get it done, then check it over more times than anyone asked for before I will call it finished.

Want to talk shop, or found a bug worth reporting? Start with the projects page.