Parks Computing Services
I'm Paul Parks, a freelance software developer based in Singapore. If you'd like to know more about my skills and background, please take a look at my resume.
Below are some of my personal blog articles. Some are new, and some are from an earlier version of this site before I transferred it from WordPress to my own bespoke engine. If you find the articles interesting, or if you'd like more information on a particular topic, let me know.
Sudoku
Friday, 22 September 2023
I didn't like most of the Sudoku apps I found, so I decided to write one as a fun little evening and weekend project. It lets you edit and share games. More »
Updated Résumé
Sunday, 20 August 2023
Fitting almost 35 years of professional experience into a four-page Microsoft Word document is a daunting task! More »
Excel Employee Capacity Spreadsheet
Wednesday, 26 July 2023
I once managed a team of business analysts and a separate team of software engineers. In order to be able to track their utilisation and capacity at see both at a glance, I developed an Excel spreadsheet that would display colourful graphs that could quickly reveal when employees were over- or under-utilised. More »
Personas In the Wild
Friday, 23 June 2023
If you've been around software product management long enough, you've encountered the concept of personas. Here's a story about seeing one in the wild. More »
Becoming a Developer Overnight, In Only Five Years
Monday, 09 January 2023
This post was inspired by an article on Cal Newport's site that caused me to reflect on my path to my current career. More »
New Website Design
Thursday, 01 December 2022
I'm in the process of porting my site to ASP.NET Razor Pages using .NET 7.0, hosted on Azure. More »
FizzBuzz
Thursday, 01 December 2022
This is just one of those things you have to write, apparently. Here is mine, in C++. More »
Set-Associative Cache in C#, Part 2: Interface Design
Wednesday, 04 August 2021
This is part 2 of a multi-part series on implementing a set-associative cache in C#. More »
Set-Associative Cache in C#, Part 1: Analysis & Initial Design
Sunday, 01 August 2021
This is part 1 of a multi-part series in which I turn a coding test from an interview into a more appropriate treatment for the true complexity of the exercise. More »
Barbecue and Project Management
Friday, 10 June 2016
Going through the process of preparing some smoked barbecue for Memorial Day got me thinking about a few parallels with project management, particularly in the field of software development. More »
Scheduling Every Minute, Revisited
Monday, 08 February 2016
Late last year, I published an article entitled "How I Plan Every Minute of My Day to Stay Productive," where I described my personal daily workflow of planning the tasks that I need to accomplish and then adjusting that plan as necessary throughout the day. I have a new job now, so I want to post an update on how well the approach is working in a new environment with new responsibilities, and how I've made a few tweaks to the process. More »
Conway's Game of Life
Friday, 20 November 2015
I realized one day that I had never implemented Conway’s Game of Life, which is something of a rite of passage for young computer-science students. As I opted for a more non-traditional path to the software profession, I somehow missed that fun, even though I’ve made a point of implementing other computer-sciency things like it. More »
How I Plan Every Minute of My Day to Stay Productive
Wednesday, 09 September 2015
Over the years, I have progressed from being a software developer who focuses on code all day, to a designer who designs and codes, to a technical lead who communicates a design and technical strategy to a team of developers, to a technical and project lead who leads developers in the implementation of a project while communicating with customers and other stakeholders. At each level the demands on my time have increased, while the expectations of improved productivity and reliable delivery have also increased. More »
Pbrain
Tuesday, 02 June 2015
The pbrain programming language is an extension I made to the Brainf**k programming language that adds the ability to define and call procedures. More »
WinDragsens
Friday, 29 May 2015
In response to a comment regarding the console-based version of the drag sensitivity utility, I’ve created a new version of the utility that includes a graphical interface and a means of testing the drag settings in the interface. More »
Master Foo and the Technical Recruiter
Thursday, 28 May 2015
I found Eric Raymond’s Unix Koans of Master Foo several years ago and simply loved them. Like the Zen koans they are taken from, they are a succinct way to communicate concepts of software development, specifically as they relate to the Unix development subculture. More »
Dragsens
Friday, 29 May 2015
Inspired by an article by Raymond Chen about how to correctly change the Windows mouse drag sensitivity, I wrote a simple utility called dragsens. It’s a small command-line utility that will allow you to change the number of pixels the mouse has to travel before a drag operation is initiated. More »
George Orwell and Effective Coding
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Earlier today I read an essay on the decline of the English language by George Orwell. The essay is excellent, and I'm already trying to apply its lessons to my writing, but there was one passage that struck me as being particularly useful for software development. More »
COMPUTE! Magazine Archives!
Sunday, 15 May 2011
I just found an archive of COMPUTE! magazine, which is the magazine that taught me how to program in the 1980's. Just recently I was lamenting not keeping every single issue I ever had (which was most of them), but now I can flip back through them any time. Looking through the site really brought back some memories of when I first started messing with computers, around 1983 or so. More »
Barcode Generator
Thursday, 06 May 2010
A simple barcode generator which is badly in need of an update. More »