Writer, researcher, do-gooder, former coder.

In the early 2000’s, I had the privilege of working with Doug Engelbart on his “Bootstrap Project”. (Was even the project lead, for a time.) It’s great to see concepts he and his team pioneered reified here, in Obsidian (in particular, granular notes and transclusions).

Prior to that (way back in the 80’s) I implemented a proof-of-concept outlining program, and became the lead wannapreneur for brilliant developers Dave Edgerton and Tom Dinger, who created a powerful outlining program based on that concept. (StreamLine. Heard of it?)

In that project, I focused on the “ergonomic philosophy” required to make the interface as powerful, intuitive, and familiar as possible. (Choose two!) So it’s terrific to see so many outlining features available in Obsidian, as well.

After a career as a coder, I transitioned to a career writing about code, where I discovered I was the head canary in the usability coal mine. Wrote dozens of articles at Java World and Artima.com.

Along the way, I discovered the joy of Ruby (my favorite out of 20+ programming languages and another 20+ command-script languages) and the power of metalanguages, mostly wrt the powerful tool set enabled by that feature. Became a huge fan of test-driven development and Fowler’s test-based refactoring in the process.

Currently, I’m focused on meditation practices and energy research (human energy, earth energy, solar energy, the electric universe, and how they interrelate). There is a lot of research to organize, many ideas to track, and a need to find important bits and put them together to make a publication to share info with others.

I’ve become a huge fan of YouTube lectures and how-to videos. Discovered Obsidian after following a link from a “Smart Notes” video on the Zettelkasten Method. So I have a dual interest in capturing notes and the process of creating publications from them.

In talks about Obsidian, I’m impressed by the continual emphasis on “This is the way I do things, you may have a different way.”

I have several websites at this juncture:

• https://TreeLight.com, pioneered in 1998, with 600+ articles on nutrition and a variety of other subjects.
• https://MeditateBetter.com, focused on “energy flow” meditation practices and a meditation bench.
• My Medium account, where I have begun publishing articles on multiple topics (letting someone else manage the platform!). The list includes Obsidian ROCKS for Thinkers.

An up-to-date list of my published books is available on my Amazon author page. Particularly relevant here is:

• The JBuilder (2) Java Bible
  (well-written tutorial, badly titled, no longer relevant)