Summer in Phoenix

Not that it has anything to do with anything, but boy is it a crazy night here in Phoenix. It’s 9:40pm, temperature is 89 degrees Fahrenheit (weather.com says “Feels Like 95 degrees”), and there’s nonstop lightning, booming thunder, rain, hail–I think I saw frogs landing in my driveway.  (OK, not really on the frogs.)

That’s my kind of weather, so I decided I’d go get a coffee at McDonald’s.  I hop in the car, head over there and pull into the drivethru.   The guy at the front of the line is in a heated argument with the cops and looks like he’s about to get himself arrested.  And they’re holding everybody else up (holding us up as in “preventing forward progress,” not “demanding our valuables at gunpoint”), much to the consternation of the manager.  I still left with a coffee though I had to go inside to get it.  That’s OK; such is the price for the excitement of braving a gunshot wound just to get a good cup of coffee.  Yes, I just called McDonald’s a good cup of coffee.

Anyway.

A proper welcome

So welcome, dear visitor, to our Spring in Practice blog! This is where my brother John and I will tell you all about what we’re doing with the new book we’re writing for Manning.  (The title, if you haven’t guessed, is going to be something like Spring in Practice.)  But that’s really only half of what we’re doing here, and probably the less-important half.  The other thing we want to do is create a forum for getting your thoughts/feedback/criticism (constructive or otherwise; we’ll take it all) on our ideas and even our actual book as it materializes.

I’ll do a post about the book itself next time, but for now I’ll just introduce myself since I think readers like to know a little about the authors of books they read.  I’ll leave it up to John to introduce himself to you.

About me

I’m Willie Wheeler, and I’ve been doing software professionally for about eleven years now.  At my day job I’m a software development director for a major company here in Phoenix.  At night, when I’m not cruising the hood, narrowly escaping with my life and my coffee, I’m usually up in my man cave goofing around on the computer.  A fair amount of that goofing around is programming, and I also do quite a bit of writing even apart from the book.

In school I studied math and philosophy as an undergraduate, and then I did a brief stint as a Ph.D. student in Philosophy.  My then-girlfriend-now-wife gently persuaded me (with no ulterior motive, I’m sure (just kidding, honey)) that maybe I’d be better positioned to secure gainful employment, and possibly even more personally fulfilled, pursuing my computing interest professionally.  She was definitely right about that.  I transferred to the master’s program in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and I’ve never looked back.  I love software development.

Hobbywise–and I’m not afraid to make words up–I enjoy standard geek fare: computers, programming computers, math, reading, reading about computers, music, Star Wars, Legos… you get the picture. No martial arts though I understand that that would further enhance my geek cred.

I mentioned my lovely wife; I also have three great kids.  I don’t know whether I should be proud or embarrassed, but one of them (the five-year-old, our oldest) has beat me twice at Risk when I was actually trying to win.  I hope that will not seriously undermine your confidence in me as your humble author, but you can look at it this way too: I’m a great teacher??  At any rate, I have the best family I could ask for and I enjoy being a husband and dad.

That’s enough about me.  Thanks for visiting and I hope you’ll like reading about the book and even helping us out with it as we go forward.