About Me (The Longer Version)

My name is David Harper, and I'm a full-stack Web developer and technologist.

I enjoy working with software generally, so I'm comfortable building anywhere in the stack. To me, it's more about what I can learn and what problems my client or team wants solved. That's why my career is this wide-ranging mix of commercial and research projects. I have a track record of demolishing any problem you put in front of me, and in the process, I get to learn about existing tools and perspectives.

Those perspectives add up. My career has given me an aggregate view of software that goes beyond experience with a particular language or framework. There are deeper patterns in software, like those Christopher Alexander described for physical architecture and human spaces. And just like Alexander noted, the patterns become visible by observing people. How do people build and interact with software? The patterns are a way to better understand the needs of people and provide solutions that scale. And that kind of value is what this is all about. It's why software is a high-margin business and why I'm worth my rate.

That's why I'm so excited about the Open Web. People have put so many engineering hours into weaving those patterns right into it. Roy Fielding even quotes Alexander in his Ph.D. dissertation that introduces REST. The improvement we've seen in just the last decade is really exciting, but it's still early days. We're headed to a general, universal computation platform that's available for anyone who wants to build software, regardless of experience.