Standingwater

👋 Hi,

I'm Michael Sendker, and this is Standingwater.

Really it's just me. Standingwater LLC is just me.

I'm a generalist software developer from Central Florida obsessed with learning new things. Standingwater is my one-man agency.

My projects show my work, and my blog shows my thoughts. Here's my résumé Résumé and here's my GitHub GitHub. Oh, and my email is m at standingwater dot io

But if you want to know how I think (and that's really what this is all about, right?), then keep scrolling. 👇

Palmettos and slash pine, Muscadine running wild and ibises probing the damp ground after a thunderstorm. Standing water and mosquitos have been a part of this landscape for hundreds of millions of years. These woods and their pooling waters have seen Timucua and Calusa, Appalachee and Seminoles, Spanish Conquistadores and French Huguenots, buccaneers like José Gaspar, Haitian rebels like Georges Biassou, Cuban exiles, Puerto Rican refugees, and immigrants from all over the world. That is the Florida you don't see in brochures. That is Standingwater.

The point is this: software is about eternity 🪨 and change. You have to think about the past and the future, and the diversity of your options. It's always in the back of your mind. Tech debt, project structure, dependency choices. You have to think about who will inherit your code, just as the Earth. It's all a careful game of eternity and change.

Computer Science is Applied Math, and Software Engineering is Applied Philosophy

I have never seen a more apt metaphor. I majored in Philosophy at Florida State University and started programming because I was obsessed with literature and wanted a better resource for picking it apart. I built anno.wiki. With that project I learned Python and JavaScript, Flask and SQLAlchemy, deployment and maintenance, database design and application structuring. I found myself fascinated by how much deep thinking I had to do about the long term maintainability and expansibility of the project itself.

In short, I fell in love with software. A few years later I started working in the industry. I've done contracts and W2s, frontend, backend, and fullstack. I've done scrapers and hardware. But all I know is this: I love the philosophy of it. The choices between static and dynamic languages, opinionated and unopinionated frameworks, fast code and readable code. Is this one-liner too complex? Should I /* drop in a comment */ or just rewrite it?

Writing a book is a lot like talking to someone in the future. Writing software is more like working with someone in the future.

If you agree, I hope to hear from you. Drop me a line. Say hi! ✌️