Welcome to the wide world of jostylr, a web programmer, mathematician, and father.
The best way to get to know me is through my writings:
My portfolio, if you will
My GitHub Repo This is where my long list of current projects reside.
Literate Programming This allows me to compile markdown documents into any kind of code I like.
Event When An event library that allows one to say, "do this after multiple things happen."
Goodloe Solitaire. Goodloe Poker is a poker variant that involves no betting, but a lot of lying. Essentially, one person gets a hand. They make a call, pass the hand along. If accepted, the next person must call something higher and the cycle repeats. If not accepted, then the hand is revealed. If it is lower than the called value, the player passing loses. Otherwise, the other player loses. After three losses, a player is out. Twos are wild.
To play this game well, you need to know the poker hands, their ordering, and get a feeling for what is easy to improve and what is not. To train people to the necessary level, I created Goodloe Solitaire. This is a game whose sole purpose is to maximize one's score by improving the hand. The end of the game is when you decide to end it or one runs out of cards. It is simple, fast, and effective.
This international holiday, every August 14, is the opposite of Valentine's Day. Instead of celebrating your loved ones, we celebrate our enemies, our bugbears if you will. To do so, give them a lovely gift that is inappropriate in some way. This originated with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A brief pertinent background is that I obtained a PhD from Rutgers University in mathematics on the topic of Bohmian mechanics, a theory of quantum mechanics. I also dabble in differential geometry. On pleasant occasions, I get to dabble in both simultaneously. This is my advisor's page.
After a couple of years in academia (Iowa State University, Marymount University), I ended up teaching in a distance education program (Center for Talented Youth, Johns Hopkins University) teaching very bright and gifted K-12 students who are eager to learn mathematics. It has been very enjoyable and educational. It has afforded me the opportunity to focus on mastering web technologies. I have taught the full range of high school mathematics course.
I left that program (though since have gone back to work part-time) in an effort to focus on my projects and to raise my daughter.
As for computers, when I was young I had extensive interactions with them and was a natural programmer. But during my college and graduate years, I lacked a computer (portable computers were not too good in those days and I hate clunky desk ones). But once I obtained one again, I learned Perl followed by Javascript and PHP. These languages are extremely nice to program in and their power is amazing.