About Carl Milsted Portfolio

Most of my career has been doing analysis/design/coding for defense contractors. As such, you cannot just go on the web or buy a copy of the packages I helped write. And people in that industry tend to network by means other than LinkedIn. Furthermore, in 1999 I left Northrop Grumman to work for a small defense contracting business started by a coworker, so I have been working from home ever since, and moved out of Northern Virginia to boot -- not exactly the path to power networking.

When said small defense contractor wound down operations this presented a problem.

And so I present this portfolio as evidence of my skills to potential employers. This portfolio has two main components:

1. The articles you will find when you hit the Posts button.
2. The site you are reading these posts on.

Back when I was "temporarily" laid off, the major social media sites had gone all-in for censorship, and the alternatives were either boring or borderline Nazi. So I started coding up a social media site designed to be more thoughtful than Twitter, and then got enough megalomania to make it into a competitor for Facebook and blogs. I figured I could find some angry Rich Republicans to help me finish this site before my savings ran out.

Alas, Elon Musk bought Twitter and sucked the air out of the room. Competing with Elon Musk is difficult.

So as my backup plan I present this site as evidence of web skills. The back end is coded in Go, using the standard libraries and just two imports: one for interfacing with the database, and one for doing emails. While glueware can provide spectacular up front productivity, maintenance becomes a problem over time, so the back end is mostly my code. Furthermore, the front end JavaScript code is minimal. What I lose fighting with the Go compiler I gain by not needing a debugger.

This site runs on a single VPS and connects to the web via an Apache reverse proxy. The development version of this site runs 10x faster on my 12 year old consumer grade desktop. My plan was to scale up and shard some functionality before figuring out how to scale out. Besides, AWS proved itself capricious when they broke their contract with Parler. Most of the code was written over a year and a half period.

The first posts show off some of the features of this site. These posts are followed by some posts showing off my math and number crunching skills. In the pipeline are some CUDA related posts.

I also have a Github account. Currently, it just has my modifications to GNU eqn. I may add some of my hobby code later.