About

What's this blog about?

I took a couple classes in college taught by Artifical Intelligence great Patrick Winston. He made a point of leaving us each week with some life lessons in the form of so-called Gold Star Ideas. He shared two or three dozen with us, although to be honest I've forgotten almost all of them. One, though, has stuck with me particularly well:

If you really want to learn something, teach somebody else.
If there's nobody else around, teach yourself.

This blog is me teaching myself. I guess you're the somebody else. Hopefully we both get something out of it.

Who's this blog by?

I'm Aston Motes. I'm a 29 year-old computer programmer living in San Francisco who used to work at Dropbox. I grew up in South Carolina, where there were a lot fewer geeky people, but plenty of computers to keep kids like me entertained.

I keep my nerd side in check by way of an unhealthy obsession with music. I do my best to live my life with musical accompaniment at all times. Like that one Family Guy episode where Peter gets his own theme music, but with headphones instead. If you ever catch me without my PX-100 headphones on, it's probably because they're in my pocket. I only take them off to play drums with They Fight Bears.

BTW, you should check out OmniRef for a great Ruby documentation search engine.