Baking With Neurospice on Paddy’s Blog

In August, I was fortunate enough to be invited to EngineYard’s Distill conference in San Francisco to speak about my experiences with mental illness.

I found myself reading past entries in Philip Roberts’ blog.

So here’s the thing.

Sit down.

For the last year or so, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about how I approach my work.

This is a talk I delivered at php[tek] 2014 during the Mental Health Summit.

My name is Paddy Foran, and I make superhumans.

Dear Recruiter, You are probably reading this post because you failed to approach me in a way that was in any way conducive to generating interest in working for your client.

Open is a wonderful thing.

Almost a year ago, we lost Aaron.

This is a talk I gave at Ignite Buffalo, largely because I wanted to make the reference to René Magritte and The Treachery of Images.

This past weekend, my puppy was being unbearably cute again.

When I was in college, pursuing an English major, I took a course entitled the American Hero.

I spent the 2nd and 3rd of July on the Parris Island Marine Corps Recruit Depot to watch my younger brother—I can’t rightly call him my “little brother” anymore—become a Marine.

When I was working from my parents’ house, I had a maxim scrawled on my whiteboard—I think it was “my job is to win hearts and minds”, but I don’t really remember.

I’m going to try something new today, because days are nothing if not opportunities to try new things.

[Update: a lot of my views have evolved on this, and this is not necessarily reflective of my current thoughts.

I’ve spent an entire flight from Lyon, France to Istanbul, Turkey thinking about how to write this post, and I still have no idea how to approach it.

This is a talk I built for the amazing RealtimeConf Europe conference (you can read my writeup of the event), but I practised it on students at the University of Buffalo first.

As part of my role at Iron.io, I attend a lot of hackathons.

Someone I admire and respect has taken it upon himself to do a remarkably painful thing to make his community better.

For quite some time now, I have vocally denounced clever programming tricks.

The above quote comes from Jenny Lawson, commonly referred to as The Bloggess.

For me, 2012 began as a contradiction.

Note: I originally wasn’t sure I was going to publish this.

I really just need to stop reading Hacker News.

To date, I have “published” precisely two pieces of software.

As of yesterday, August 21, 2012, at 1:00pm EST, I officially became homeless.

Developer experience is a pretty new field.

I never went to school for computer science.

During the keynote of day one of Google I/O, Sergey Brin orchestrated a rushed, off-kilter, and stunning display of the company’s revolutionary Google Glass technology.

Just over six months ago, I started working at Iron.io as a software engineering intern.

Disclaimer: I work for a cloud computing company, so I’m obviously a bit biased in favour of the cloud.

It is no secret that, ever since I joined up with Iron.io, I’ve been mildly obsessed with Iron Man.

I started playing with the internet at a young age.

I’ve always intuitively agreed with the practice of eating your own dog food.

When I told my mother I was going to be representing Iron.io at UB Hacking, her first response was, and I quote: “Please don’t get arrested.”

I think I had the idea for this talk on accident.

Note: This story is still in-progress.

Today’s post has no point.

When I was hired by Iron.io, they hired me as a intern Software Engineer.

I’m considering moving my personal site over to Github pages to be powered by Jekyll.

It’s one of my favourite perks of being a small (one programmer, one manager/business guy) tech company: we’re “nimble”.

Dear Congress, Hey guys, how’ve you been?

I’ve been meaning to write a post about companies and users, and what I believe their relationship should be.

By now, most of you running App Engine applications have received the dreaded email: App Engine is leaving beta.

Disclaimer: I tend to write posts for this blog, maybe sleep on them (at most), then publish them.

Google’s App Engine is a wonderful, amazing, and revolutionary service.

Last Thursday, my roommate turned 21.

We’ve been running a feedback survey for 2cloud for a couple of weeks now, trying to get a sense of how we’re doing with the project.