Kai MacTane’s Essays

Here are a few essays I’ve written on various aspects of my philosophy about how technology should be used, and on how I approach any given technology task. The most recent of these dates back to fall of 2005; you can find my more recent writings and thoughts about software and web development on my blog, “Coyote Tracks”.

On Web Design and Development
The most recent of my essays on my engineering philosophy (written in September, 2005), this document covers both page/site design (and the attendant user-interface and usability considerations) and development (back-end coding, processing and programming). Aside from that duality, however, it restricts itself completely to the web, and leaves questions of coding for other purposes to the previous document.
On Coding
This document, written in early 2004, is more of a high-level, executive overview of my feelings about coding in general, whether for the web, system administration tasks, desktop apps, or anything else.
On System Administration
My start in the high-tech field was as a Linux system administrator (and, to some extent, a Windows desktop support specialist as well). Though I’ve mostly moved away from system administration, the ideas laid forth in this essay formed some of the basis for my more recent explorations of coding and web development philosophy. If you read all three, you’ll be able to see a clear line of progression from this piece to the other two, and an expansion of many of the same core beliefs.
How I Became a Geek
This is a much shorter piece, and lighter in tone than the others. It’s an autobiographical account of how I learned to quit trying to insist that I “didn’t want to be a computer geek” and learned instead to embrace a field that came very naturally to me.