So you say you’re curious about life in the Midwest, eh? And my life in particular? Well I’m flattered. My name is Max Diebold, and I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city in the Eastern time zone with the largest metropolitan area in Ohio and the third largest in the state by population.

We may not have the same landscape as in the PST, but our outdoors are still great. My favorite “local” getaway is Red River Gorge in Daniel Boone National Forest, and I recently took my first trip to Hawking Hills State Park near Athens, OH, both of which are just a few hours’ drive from Cincy (colloquialism for Cincinnati).

My introduction to software likely also served as the inception point for my journey with OSU: there are endless educational resources on the internet, and the more I utilized them, the more interested I became in the creation and transmission of the resources themselves. I had an early foray into IT at the University of Cincinnati, but it was hard so I bailed into culinary school and fine dining. That turned out to be very physically strenuous, so I decided to give my noggin another go and enrolled in the eCampus program at Oregon State. To be fair, I enrolled before COVID-19 struck and remote learning became cool.

Before my enrollment, I’d been mostly self-taught, and I only had limited experience in web development: the book Eloquent JavaScript was immensely helpful, as was working my way through the React framework and using it to build websites for local businesses. Web development is not my only field of interest, but my experience with React was enough to land me a job at Eastern Research Group, Inc. in April as a junior developer.

I’ve been a Linux user for some time now, initially because it’s free and open source (and still because it’s free and open source), but also because it’s proven to be very resilient. I’ve been enjoying Arch Linux as my favorite “flavor” of Linux for about 5 years now: it’s very lightweight, meaning initial configuration is a bit more involved than other distributions, but its accompanying wiki is among the best.

Using Arch Linux has turned me and the command prompt into close pals, and, correspondingly, I have developed a particular fondness for terminal user interfaces (TUIs). I’ve sought out a multitude of applications over time that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if not for their TUI. My shell of choice is the Z Shell (Zsh), which has somewhat recently become the default shell for Mac.

I am a devout Vim user (though I’ve happily converted to NeoVim), mainly because I hate using the mouse to edit code (or to do anything). My NeoVim configuration is slightly less portable than a base .vimrc (the main Vim configuration file), but I think the added features are worth it. In my free time, I like to make sounds with the SuperCollider audio synthesis language, and there just so happens to be several plugins for NeoVim to facilitate the pursuit.

Naturally, I was drawn to the Embedded System Digital Audio Loop Station project, and I was fortunate enough to land it.