Back to Home

An Introduction Piece

Hey! Thanks for stopping by. My name's Graham Barber, as the front page says. The brief synopsis of who I am can be found on the homepage, but I thought it would be nice to talk a little bit more about my background—I also needed an MDX file to properly seed my Gatsby build process, so we're killing two birds with one stone here.

My Origins

I've spent about 50% of my life in Dublin, Ohio, and the other 50% in Corvallis, Oregon. The best I can describe the transition in between those places is "character-building." On one hand, there was academically-rigourous, sprawling Dublin, but on the other, there's laid-back, compact Corvallis; a town with a university in the middle of it. The shock of going from one place to the next was a wake-up call—I function much better in a laid-back environment, but I still have all the obsessive habits of a Dubliner. I made my fair share of bad decisions that I don't want to recount, though, so let's move on from this topic.

My celebrities growing up weren't pop stars or actors. Instead, I found role models in a strange space for 12-year-olds to wander: Technology journalism. I became intensely passionate about the first iPad when it was released in 2010, and so I started reading tech blogs like Engadget, Arstechnica, and Gizmodo. I especially latched onto Josh Topolsky, Paul Miller, and Nilay Patel as a result of the Engadget podcast. I admired the ferocity of their conversations, their wit, and the insights they had about all sorts of tech-related topics. Over the years, I became a walking human catalog of tablets, laptops, and phones—always doing my best to recommend the right product for the right needs.

I became enamored with the idea of becoming a project manager at some point in high school. It was around this time that I learned how to program—not because I was interested in programming as a profession, but because all of my friends were software developers, and I felt that I would better be able to assist with their efforts if I knew how to code. By the time I graduated, I decided that it would be a better idea for me to go to university to get a business degree than a computer science degree, since I had already taught myself some of the latter, but I had little experience with the former.

Today

Thus, here I am: graduating from Oregon State University with a Bachelors of Science in Management. All the while, I managed to stay involved in software development at the OSU Center for Applied Systems and Software. As I move on to the next step in my life, I'm looking for career opportunities that will enable me to coordinate both business concerns and software development efforts. I had several stints with entrepreneurship, so I have a special place in my heart for startups—but, intrapreneurship or small teams will suit me just fine.

This development is the underlying motive for this blog. Almost everything I'm proud of has been hidden in closed-source projects, so I needed a place to start learning in public. If you go to my GitHub, you'll find a wealth of snappily-named (seriously, I'm pretty proud of some of them) projects that might have slick landing pages, but lack finished functionality.

Previously, these husks have weighed on my mind, begging for me to come back and complete them. This is no longer the case: I might be a software developer, but my strengths lie in communication, writing, and teaching. I firmly believe that my time will be better spent documenting what I know and what I have learned than showing that I have development competence through my repositories. I also believe that I have a unique perspective, as a developer who has just recently experienced an undergraduate business education. I'm an ambitious developer too—that's exactly why I need to escape the mindset that side projects are the best way to show yourself off. Today, I can document my thought processes, and in the future, I can channel my ambition towards the efforts of a company that I work for.

About this blog

This blog is equal-parts professional showcase, brain dump, and sanity anchor. Here's a quick taste of the things I plan to write about:

  • Explainers of business concepts for technical people
  • Explainers of technical concepts for business people
  • Design and implementation walkthroughs of completed projects
  • Architecture blueprints for theoretical projects
  • More about-me information (I promise not to talk about myself too much)
  • Life philosophy stuff

I reckon that some of that sounds useful or interesting. If not for you, then at least for me. I'll do my best not to waste your time.

Thanks a ton for reading this far. I hope you're as excited as I am to learn more about business, software development, and what they mean for each other. I'll see you again soon!