Doug Ferguson

My name is Doug Ferguson and I've been doing the programming thing for about 30 years now. Some of the domains for which I've written software include oilfield construction, retail, dating and finance to name a few.

I'm a language nerd who is continuously learning new languages, both spoken and compiled. I'm particularly interested in functional languages and the approaches they take to solving problems. It's been enlightening to study various languages and recognize various patterns, even though the approaches may go by different terms in different languages.

I've found that the things of which I have the deepest understanding are the ones I've had to teach. It's one thing to think you understand how something works. It's a completely different thing to understand a complex topic well enough to explain it in terms so that 12 year old can understand it too. If you can't do that, then you don't really know it.

My goal for this blog is to deepen my understanding of things by forcing me to explain them. Hopefully it will help someone else understand something a bit better too.

I currently work at S&P Global, but any thoughts, opinions and musings are my own and should not be attributed to the company.