About Me
My name is John Wood. I am a software developer, a devoted husband and father, and a martial artist. These are by far the biggest areas of my life, and consume the majority of my time. I wouldn’t have it any other way. As the blog title suggests, this site contains a collection of my thoughts. Most of what you find here is software related, but occasionally a non-software thought will drift into my head, and eventually end up here.
My love of software began in high school, 1995, when I took my first programming course, C (the language, not my grade). Ever since that moment, I have known what I wanted to do with my life. It must have had something to do with the ability to solve limitless problems in numerous ways that attracted me to programming. I am now a Senior Software Engineer at Orbitz Worldwide, helping to bring you Orbitz.com, Cheaptickets.com, EBookers.com, and many others.
I met my future wife Beth that same year. We married in 2001, welcomed our son Dylan in 2004, and daughter Chloe in 2007. These two little rug rats have brought me unmeasurable amounts of joy. I am greatly looking forward to watching them grow, guiding them and teaching them, all the while praying that it doesn’t happen too fast.
In 1999, I began studying shotokan karate while at Northern Illinois University. Little did I know that this would end up being a huge part of my future life. I am now a volunteer karate instructor, leading classes at Southwest Chicago Shotokan, and assisting with classes at Chicago Shotokan. Both schools are affiliated with Shotokan Karate of America, a non-profit organization teaching karate in the US since 1955. We hold true to our parent organization’s non-profit status by volunteering our time as instructors, and keeping costs at a bare minimum, so anybody who wants to learn karate can.
I enjoy keeping up with the rapid pace of the software industry. I am a frequent visitor of many technology related websites, I read many books on software development, and I spend quite a bit of time playing around with new technologies. Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into dynamic languages such as Ruby and Groovy, trying to determine how I can best use them to help me do my job quicker and better.
Feel free to email me at john_p_wood@yahoo.com regarding whatever.
