About Compile and Run

Howdy! My name is Justin Turpin. I'm a software engineer currently doing backend for a legal tech company in California. I've been programming since I was pretty young: as a kid, me and my brother had delusions of grandeur and tried to create a videogame so we could get rich. We started with this software called 3D Rad, then moved on to something called Darkbasic). Since making a game requires slightly more time and expertise than two kids with a free Summer, we never got to make our game that was most likely a terrible ripoff of Halo. Nonetheless, that set us both off on the quest to become effective programmers.

When I was 11 I got this yellow book called "Introduction to Game Programming" or something like that - it contained Visual C++ 6.0 Introductory Edition, the DirectX SDK and a low-poly model animator. I didn't make any games with this, but I did learn a lot of C++, MFC, the Windows API and some DirectX over the next few years. Later I learned how to use wxWidgets as it was the only free cross-platform GUI toolkit at the time. I owe any programming skills I have to freely available C++ tutorials online at the time.

I was introduced to Python 2.4 or 2.5 my Freshman year of high school after my programming teacher had showed me it. I remember being very confused and annoyed that it didn't have a main function, and just executed code from top to bottom. It's interesting how your mind develops an idea of how things should work, and then tries to reject anything that flows contrary to that way.

Later I learned enough PHP, MySQL and Javascript to make a terrible blog (why terrible? think about what a 14 year old might blog about). This ended up being convenient as I landed a PHP student job when I was in UC Irvine, and then later as a full stack developer in LA once I was out of college.

Lately I've been playing with Rust and I'm looking forward to what it will do for software development in the next 10 years. I mostly use Python, and I'm trying to branch out more and more.

I've been using a ton of Docker and Kubernetes. Docker is my go-to development tool for anything web related. Kubernetes is criticized as a lot of "hype" in some online communities, but it really does solve a lot of issues related to container orchestration, especially when it comes to volumes.

I have a container running the website and then a container running Traefik which auto-configures Let's Encrypt. Running in Digitalocean because it's fast and cheap.