My name is Adam. I’m a software developer in Calgary, Alberta. If you don’t know where that is, look on a map — you’ll find it in Canada, somewhere between the Rocky Mountains and a whole lot of prairie.
It’s been nearly a quarter century that I’ve been doing this job. What gets me isn’t what we can do with computers. It’s how much we depend on them now. They’ve shaped how we work, how we think, how we talk to each other. That part is worth paying attention to.
I’m less interested in the front end, even though most of the work I’ve done involves some aspect of the UI. The backend is where the fun lives and where the real problems happen.
When I’m not working, you’ll find me homelabing or tinkering with side projects. Otherwise I’m riding one of my bikes (I have six, and ride year-round in every kind of weather Calgary throws at me), building Lego, camping by foot or by bike, or taking the kids to their sports. I do a lot of stuff, and there is never enough time. A doctor once told me I’m not a human-being, I’m a human-doing.
What is smrtguy.io?
A place for experiments, ideas, and the things I build. Most of it isn’t production-ready, but it represents real problems I’ve worked through. I want to write more about what I learn, technical or not. Writing makes things stick. When you have to explain a topic, you find the holes in your understanding pretty fast. No listicles promising you’ll 10x your productivity (there’s enough of those on Medium already, though to be fair, some of the good stuff lives there too).
The name? It’s not me claiming to be smart. It’s a joke about how dumb you feel most of the time doing this job. You solve one impossible problem and then spend an hour debugging something that turns out to be a typo. Everyone I’ve worked with knows that feeling. The misspelling is deliberate — none of us have it all figured out.
People love to argue about tools. Terraform vs Pulumi. Vim vs Emacs. Tabs vs spaces. (It’s spaces. Fight me.) But knowing what to build and why matters more than knowing how. That said, the how still matters, since knowing why you need a message queue doesn’t help if you can’t wire one up.
So that’s what this site is about: the what, the why, and the how.
How to reach me
The best way to reach me is by email . Some people call that old-fashioned, which is funny when you think about how much of the internet still runs on it. I’m also on LinkedIn , though I don’t check it all that often.
I don’t use much social media, and I’m not really against it. A lot of valuable stuff gets shared there. But there’s a lot of noise too, and I find my time is better spent talking to people face to face. I had a Twitter account and also stopped using it long before it became X, and I barely use Facebook. I have a Mastodon account somewhere in the fediverse, but I’m fairly sure it’s buried in the graveyard of 1Password credentials I’ve accumulated over the years.