Nate Taylor

On June 3, my world got turned upside down. At around 6pm I got a call from my sister’s phone. When I answered, it was my brother-in-law and I knew instantly something terrible had happened. It turns out that my dad had an accident of the farm and passed away. The last 6 days can ...

Over the past couple years I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts. Some have been for entertainment such as Hang Out With Me by Myq Kaplan, Strangers, or Criminal.  Others were more informative like Stuff You Should Know, Smart People Podcast or Freakonomics.  The largest category was sermons (or similar) such as The Briefing by ...

Over the past few months I’ve been using the same laptop at the office as I have at home. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed it. One thing that has been annoying, though, was closing down things I was working on when I went home. For example, I don’t want Slack or Outlook open at ...

I just spent over 10 hours doing something that should have taken about 2 hours. I mis-estimated the amount of time it would take me by 500%. I changed the struts on one of our cars this weekend. I started around 2pm on Saturday and finished around noon on Sunday. Looking back on the project ...

For my next Pluralsight course, I need an API to demonstrate some of the concepts. I want to give my viewers the ability to run the same API. I could have done this by creating an API and publishing it to Heroku. However, I was concerned about the possibility of opening up a CRUD API ...

Over the past couple months, I’ve been doing more thinking and reading about what it means to be a software developer who works for the glory of Christ. One of my favorite sermons ever is by a preacher named John Piper entitled “Don’t Waste Your Life“. I have listened to that sermon on planes, before ...

I accomplished something today that I will likely never accomplish again. I created a hashtag that was trending in the United States.   Last night a friend and fellow conference speaker Sarah Withee tweeted out that people assumed she was speaking at KCDC but she wasn’t. I was surprised, because she’s had some great talks. ...

For as long as I can remember, I’m not a huge fan of being away from home. I was the kid that would come over to your house for a sleepover and then get homesick. That is, if I actually made it to your house, too often I would cancel or turn down invites. One ...

As I watched another speaker drone on and on for his 3 minute block I looked at the clock. If I could just make it through this speaker, the first round of student congress would be over. I could enjoy a nice 30 minute break before starting round two. I was looking forward to that ...

One of the first major mistakes I made as a software engineer involved strings.  It happened about 15 years ago. I had written a tool to log out data link traffic to an encrypted file. That part was done, I could open up the file and see a bunch of gibberish. It was now time ...