About
=====

Hello! My name is Brian Neal. By day I am a real-time, embedded C++ programmer. By night and
on the weekends I like to hack on interesting projects in Python_. Right now I am mainly 
focused on web development.

My interests in web development began several years ago when I started a community-based
website for instrumental surf music fans. I simply downloaded a popular PHP CMS system, set
it up, and opened shop. Very quickly bugs appeared. "No problem", I thought, "I'm a programmer,
I can fix this." Opening up that code in a text editor was quite shocking and disappointing.
It was obvious I had chosen a framework built by amatuers with no concern for security, efficiency,
standards, or any kind of software engineering discipline. I spent about 2 years working on the
code with a group of dedicated enthusiasts, but eventually grew tired of the sprawling, cut & paste
spaghetti code. It was simply too broken and too tedious to make fundamental changes.

I started looking around for other alternatives and discoved Django_. I had some limited experience
with Python from work, and Django looked incredibly useful. Django allowed me to concentrate more
on my application and less on the "grunt work." Once I had created a small website for a friend's 
band, I knew I was hooked. I then sent out on a nearly 2 year mission to rewrite my growing website
with Django and Python. The rewrite finally went live about 2 weeks before I attended my first 
PyCon_ in 2011.

This blog will be mainly about my experiences in web development and Python. C++ and my day job may
sneak into the blog from time to time as well. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to
contact me via any of the links in the sidebar or by email (*bgneal at gmail dot com*).

Disclaimer
----------

I hope this is obvious, but please bear with me. This blog reflects my own personal opinions and 
not those of any past, present, or future employers. I hope the information found herein is useful 
to others, but I may in fact be on crack and I make no warranties of any nature. This blog is a
snapshot of my thoughts in time. I may change my mind as I learn more and gain further
experience.

Some blog posts may allow comments. Please note that I reserve the right to remove comments for any 
reason at any time.

Colophon
--------

This blog was created with Pelican_, Python_, reStructuredText_, Mercurial_,
Vim_, Fabric_, and Bootstrap_.

.. _Python: http://python.org
.. _Django: http://djangoproject.com
.. _PyCon: http://us.pycon.org
.. _Pelican: http://getpelican.com/
.. _Bootstrap: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
.. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
.. _Mercurial: http://mercurial.selenic.com/
.. _Fabric: http://fabfile.org
.. _Vim: http://www.vim.org