Rodney Stromlund

Published on 10-02-2026 at 9:03pm

Short bio

I am a Tech Lead/Senior Software Engineer; I hold a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri. I am a born again believer in Jesus Christ the Son of God who sacrificed His life to save the World from Sin.

I have worked professionally in the Medical field and in the Airline industry. I have worked in:

Assembler
C/C++
Perl/Awk/Python
Java
Haskell (as a hobby solving AoC puzzles; my AoC solutions)
bash (including a full fledged Object Oriented database application)
SQL
etc… I like learning Software Development principles as deeply as I can and implementing that in whatever language I am either constrained to (for work) or interested in (for play). I'm a bit of a polyglot and try to avoid The Blub Paradox trap.
GNU Emacs, org-mode, and GTD

Interests

Church

I have taught Sunday School, I have been on multiple mission trips (to Russia, Greece, Cuba, and rural Arkansas USA). I volunteer whenever and wherever I can be used. I love listening to teaching about the Bible, right now my favorites are Matt Whitman and The Bible Project; but I have many more in my RSS feed.

I believe the Bible is God's Word and He is the central character in His Book (not Me). I believe the Bible was not written to Me; I was written to ancient Israelites. I believe the Bible was written for Me. That's not just semantics, it is significant.

God loves you, Jesus loves you, The Holy Spirit loves you, and I love you. My wife loves everyone.

Emacs

I have been using Emacs almost as long as I've been a professional Software Engineer (and I am in my career sunset years); nothing makes me as productive as Emacs. I have been using it for decades and I still have tons to learn.

When I became a Tech Lead, I wanted a way to increase my organization skills and I found GTD (Getting Things Done by David Allen). First I tried implementing GTD in Obsidian and Zettelkasten, honestly I had avoided org-mode just because it sound like so much more Emacs to learn. And boy is it more to learn! But I would now add that nothing makes me more productive in Emacs than org-mode. It is my external brain.

Advent of Code

I dabbled a little with sites like Codewars (or was it HackerRank?) and Datawars, sites where you could test your problem solving skills. I wanted to learn Haskell and I needed something non-trivial to solve. That's when I found AoC, the mother of all coding puzzle sites. My early Haskell code would be an embarrassment to read now, no doubt. So if you look at any of my solutions, please consider the later committed solutions as my current level of Haskell programming ability.

I have been solving previous year's puzzles before I knew AoC existed; I think I have completed all but two years. So my solutions aren't necessarily "linear" in their improvement. I.e. the chronology of AoC isn't exactly the chronology in which I've completed them.

This website

I started blogging way back when blogging and RSS was cool and was going to revolutionize the internet. And in a way I guess it did. Then social media came along and enticed people way from owning their on content to giving it to them. There was no "algorithm" behind RSS, if you subscribed, you received. That was the contract.

Once "big social" had everyone on board, they terminated their RSS feeds, changed the contract at will, and started feeding you what was best for the platform and not for you.

Well I am getting sick of someone else owning my content and dictating what I see and who can or cannot see what I choose to post. I doubt that many will see this blog, I do not plan to monetize it or to even let crawlers see it.

This blog's technology

Thanks to many who came before me and posted their experience, not the least is the post Blogging using org-mode (and nothing else). This website and blog is Emacs using org-mode and published by org-publish. Such a great combination, all editing, formatting, spell checking, versioning, and publishing is done from one place. No SSGs needed, no web-app, no phone app, etc… needed.

Most of the pre-2020 content is from my blogger blog and most of the links are broken, I tried to rescue as much of the content, images, and comments as I could. I used pandoc to convert the html to org-mode files and I used Emacs to touch them up.

This website is made with ❤️ in Arkansas, USA. I try to use as little JavaScript as possible, there's just not much call for it on a blog. No ads, no dancing bears, no scrolling marques; just fast loading pages.