About Me

I'm Kurt Bruhnke, and I believe that technology should serve humans. It should make the lives of humans easier and make people more efficient at what they do. I love to devise ways to make technology work for me. Sometimes, I come across some old hardware that I try to make useful again.

I first saw a computer, the Atari 800, in the Sears catalog and thought that was the neatest idea ever. I had a toy typewriter and I understood the advantage of being able to correct typing mistakes on the TV screen before they were made permanent on paper. Soon after, my school got a Commodore 64 and I started carrying around audio cassette tapes to hold the programs that I would type in from Compute! Magazine. Eventually I got my own computer, an IBM PCjr, on which I learned BASIC and Assembly. I wrote simple games, and my own word processor that I used for writing my English papers in high school. I was overjoyed at my success when I modified MS Flight Simulator to run in 16 colors on my PCjr when, out of the box, it would use only four colors.

In college, I had to unlearn some bad programming habits I had taught myself earlier, and learn a few new languages like Pascal, C, and shell scripting. C has been the language I've used the most throughout my career in the Aerospace industry (much more than C++ even). But I enjoy learning and there are so many awesome things to learn. I've recently discovered Rust and Go, both of which I find to be a reasonable replacement for C/C++ in many cases. I'm also learning about Flutter for cross-platform mobile development. Ruby and Rails appeal to me for web application development. Soon, I'd like to wrap my head around functional programming, probably with Elixer.

Privacy is important to me, too. Our technology has become quite good at anticipating our every need, often at the cost of disclosing way more information about us than is needed to do the job. I'm on a mission to find the best ways to make my life easier while also maintaining at least a little privacy. Open source software opens many doors on the way to making this goal a reality.

My blog mainly expounds on what I've learned about various aspects of software development or technology in general and how I make my technology serve me instead of the other way around. I hope you find it beneficial, educational, or at least somewhat entertaining.