As years pass by, they reach their prime, In the fullness of time, they shine. Their cycle complete, yet never-ending, Bamboo's growth, a tale unending.

The Bamboo Garden is is my chaotic collection of evolving notes, articles, letters, and thoughts—shoots of wisdom (and occasional philosophical off-shoots) that have grown and become part of my psyche over time as I “Learn out Loud” mastering my craft as a software engineer. Welcome to the paper trail for my past and future self and the few that wander in.

The growth of Bamboo is the perfect metaphor for my lifelong love of learning. I’m currently interested in real-time systems, sympathetic engineering, and learning Rust.

Blog

Catch up on my latest blog entries here or via Medium @briancorbin.xyz.

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Latest

Data has quickly become one of the worlds most valuable assets. It powers social media, Large Language Models (LLMs), trading screens, security & risk analysis, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, advertising, agriculture, and more. Big data has a few key traits: volume (comes in enormous quantities), velocity (created and processed quickly, usually in real-time), and variety (comes structured, semi-structured, and unstructured). This technical blog series discusses getting big data moving.

Java reaches the next long-term-support version v25 in September 2025 and that warrants an exploration of its modern features. Despite the availability of newer technologies and languages like Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, and others like Go and Rust, Java still dominates many large codebases and sits 4th on the TIOBE index of programming languages. Rumors of the death of Java may be unfounded. What better way to discover and explore what’s new in a hands-on way than to over-engineer and overcomplicate the age-old game of tic-tac-toe (Over-Bytes)

Exploring intelligent AI in Tic-Tac-Toe with Minimax, MaxN, Paranoid, Alpha-Beta, and Monte Carlo Tree Search.

Great managers are not born, they’re made — all the skills needed to become an effective engineering manager and leader can be learned.

For technologists and especially software engineers and engineering managers, cultivating the art of continuous learning is critical now more than ever in order to stay relevant.

Bookshelf

My list of current reads and re-reads. Usually these are something technical, productivity, creativity or engineering related, self-improvement or “art of learning”-related. I only do fiction these days on the the big screen and audiobooks.

Audioshelf