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Carl Hinkle

Projects, hobbies, and random thoughts

Hello and welcome to my personal web page. This is where I'll share some of the things that I'm most interested in, and it also gives me a playground to try out new technologies.

I'll also be able to improve my design skills (which aren't great!) and improve my writing. So I'll be updating the site frequently and the entire design will probably change all the time. Below, you'll find some soundbite sized highlights of some of the things that I enjoy, and I'll be adding more content soon.

You can also check out the blog, where I write about anything that's on my mind. Most of the posts will be about music, tech, running, and management. I might also talk about some of the other things going on in my life.

Guitar and Music

Some people like all sorts of music. Not me. I don't think there's any question that the best era for music was the late 1980s through the mid 1990s. Guns 'n Roses, Nirvana, Soundgarden, the best Metallica albums. It didn't get better than that.

I'm only half-serious. My favorite music really is from those years, but I love rock and metal music from all different eras. Some of my favorite bands are The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Tool, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, and Breaking Benjamin, and I enjoy a lot of newer progressive music like Plini and Animals as Leaders.

I love the blues, especially Stevie Ray Vaughn, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and Joe Bonamassa. The last concert I saw, just a week or two before the Covid-19 lockdowns, was The Robert Cray Band. I miss concerts.

And when I'm working or running, I listen to a lot of Trance (it makes great background music).

My main passion outside of technology is the guitar. You can expect to hear a lot more about that on this page and some of the other side projects that I'm working on.

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Running and the Outdoors

I spend far too much time in front of the computer screen. Whether it's for work (I'm a software engineering manager), or for fun (I always have a bunch of side projects that I'm working on), or for education (you need to be a lifelong learner to survive in tech), I'm usually staring at a screen for 12-15 hours a day. That's not an exaggeration, ScreenTime will verify it.

To balance that out, I spend as much time as possible running and just being outside. In 2020 I racked up over 1200 miles of running. Most of that was on the roads or the local trails, and the rest was on my NordicTrack treadmill with iFit. If you've always hated treadmill running (like me), you ought to check out iFit. It's awesome. In 2021 I set a goal of 1250 miles, and I'm on track to blow past that.

What I really love is trail running, and once the pandemic is over there are a bunch of trail races that I want to do. My ultimate goal is to start competing in ultra-marathons. I'm still pretty far away from that, but I don't think a 50k is too far out of reach.

When I'm not running on the trails, I love to get out and hike with my wife. We're lucky enough to live in western Connecticut, just a few miles from the Appalacian Trail, and within an easy drive to the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains in eastern New York. You can find us on the trails early in the morning on most weekends, as long as there isn't snow on the ground.

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Coding

I discovered coding later than a lot of people in the Software Engineering field. I was an Electronics Technician in the US Navy from the late 1990s through the mid 'oughts, and in college I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering. It wasn't until my second year in college, when I took my first programming class, that I really caught the bug. I didn't change majors, but I did start spending a lot of my free time (whatever that meant as a EE/CompE double major) working on programming projects.

This was during the first years of the AppStore (iPhone OS 3 and 4), when the most popular apps simulated drinking a beer or making "funny" noises. Back then it was hard to believe that there were 10,000 apps on the store, and it was still relatively common for apps built by one or two people to hit big and make a lot of money.

Maybe it never was that common, but me and a few of my friends got together and formed an LLC with dreams of striking gold on the AppStore. We taught ourselves Objective-C (back in the pre-ARC days) and CocoaTouch and released a simple game. Unfortunately, we didn't know anything about business and the app (and the LLC) never went anywhere, but it did set a pattern for me that carried on throughout school. During the summers, when most people were doing internships I was working on coding projects. I'll be adding a projects page to the site eventually where I talk more about those, but for now it's enough to say that the takeaway was that I completely lost interest in Electrical Engineering.

In fact, I didn't even apply for any EE jobs. I had decided that I was going to write software for a living, and I was offered a job at the first company that I interviewed at. I'm still at Bentley Systems, 10 years later. I guess this is as good a place as any to say that everything on this site is my own content and does not in any way represent Bentley Systems. Disclaimer over.

During my career, I've worked on desktop applications using .Net. I've worked on cross-platform mobile applications built on top of a JavaScript framework that Bentley developed in-house. I moved into a tech lead role on a different mobile application built in TypeScript, then I transitioned into a technical managment role on a team building a new web application using React and Azure cloud services. Today I manage several teams of awesome people who's work spans applications and infrastructure.

Although most of my work time these days is spent managing people and projects, I still make technical contributions to most of my teams. And I work on side projects so that I can stay up to date on emerging technologies. Or if not emerging, then at least technologies that we don't use in our day-to-day work yet. This is something I plan to write a lot about, as I think it's critical for engineering managers to be able to add technical value even as they become less involved in the actual code.

I read somewhere that management isn't a promotion, it's a career change, and that has certainly been my experience. I've had the good fortune to be a part of many great teams and I'm very appreciative of that.

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