Who are you?
I’m David Boike. I live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area with my wife, a yorkie, two cats, and that’s all the homeowner association will allow. I am a Solution Architect for Inergize Digital where I design software systems centered around (but not necessarily limited to) the Microsoft development platform and C# and ASP.NET specifically.
This would probably be a good time to throw in that any viewpoints expressed in this blog are my own and in no way have anything to do with my employer.
What’s with your site title?
I happened upon this career quite by accident. In 2004 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University, but long before I earned it I knew I had found software engineering (which wasn’t offered as a major at the time) and knew I would have nothing to do with building circuits or power companies.
However, my upbringing in the College of Engineering (as opposed to Computer Science) drove home the importance of engineering concepts that I carry over to software, and became my mantra:
Build. Optimize. Make Awesome.
- Build. Theory doesn’t make anybody any money. Have an idea, design it, and build it, and remember that shipping is a feature too.
- Optimize. Make it go faster. Make it work better. Make it more user-friendly. If shipping is a feature then you’re going to (by definition) ship imperfect code. The code you wrote last week, last month, or last year always sucks, but that’s not an unfortunate fact, that’s an opportunity.
- Make awesome. Don’t just make “it” awesome, make awesome. Awesome is a thing that can be created. Don’t just make something that resembles awesome, infuse everything you do with awesome. Take it to the next level, or you’re just wasting your time building something lame.
And yes, I would love to secure the domain makeawesome.com (without the dash) but apparently it’s occupied by some sort of unfinished art project. Bummer.
