Nick Agliano

About Me:

Software engineer based in Richmond, Virginia.

Contact:

I can be reached via email (first name and last name @gmail.com, no spaces or punctuation).

Work:

I've been writing software at Simple Thread for the last 3 years.

Personal projects I'm currently working on:

• Five Hundred Words — habitual writing application
• The Book Game — novel, and maybe a board game (private, for now)
• Birthmark — healthcare software (private, for now)
• Tending to my family, my garden, and figuring out what to do with the school bus in my driveway

Writings (my favorites are appended with an asterisk):

• What I Learned About Software From Building a Chicken Coop (2024)
• LLMs in a Vacuum Are Useless (2023)
• How Software Is Preventing Blackouts (2023)
• Navigating the Intersection of AI and Creative Writing (2023)
• Through The Lens of a Programmer (2022) *
• The Bugsworth Letters, a series based on CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters (2022)
• How To Create a New Rails 7 App With Tailwind (2022)
• Secret PostgreSQL Trick (2021)
• The Best Authentication Framework Is No Framework At All(?) (2021)
• Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About WYSIWYG Editors (2021) *
• Ruby on Rails in a Week (2020) *
• Learning to Learn (2020)

Talks and Stuff:

• Fantasy Writing With the Assistance of LLMs (2024)
• Guest on Rails With Jason Podcast (2021)

Books I've read, in the vague order that I read them:

• The Ranger's Apprentice Series, John Flanagan
• The Divide, Elizabeth Kay
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, JK Rowling
• Graceling, Kristin Cashore
• Eragon, Christopher Paolini
• The Warrior Heir, Cinda Williams Chima
• The Wizard Heir, Cinda Williams Chima
• Hatchet, Gary Paulson
• Peak, Roland Smith
• Everlost, Neal Shusterman
• Anthem, Ayn Rand
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
• Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare
• Antigone, Sophocles
• The Narnia Series, CS Lewis
• Rappaccini's Daughter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
• Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
• Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
• The Stranger, Albert Camus
• The Assault, Harry Mulisch
• Perfume, Patrick Suskind
• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
• The Piano Lesson, August Wilson
• The Lion and the Jewel, Wole Soyinka
• The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
• The Wise Man's Fear, Patrick Rothfuss
• Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks
• The Martian, Andy Weir
• Welcome to Nightvale, Joseph Fink
• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
• Evolution, Carl Bergstrom
• Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
• The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin
• A Small Porch, Wendell Berry
• The Bible, multiple authors
• The Emerald Mile, Kevin Fedarko
• Mere Christianity, CS Lewis
• Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives, Jim Blascovich
• Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick
• There's This River... Grand Canyon Boatman Stories, Christa Sadler
• Raging River, Lonely Trail Tales Told by the Campfire's Glow, Vaughn Short
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles*
• The Unbroken Thread, Sohrab Ahmari*
• SQL Cookbook: Query Solutions and Techniques for Database Developers, Anthony Molinaro
• Thoughts for Young Men, JC Ryle
• Spurgeon's Sermons Vol 1, Charles Spurgeon
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck
• On the Road, Jack Kerouac
• A Timbered Choir, Wendell Berry*
• The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis*
• Reforesting Faith, Matthew Sleeth
• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson*
• Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier*
• Magic Kingdom for Sale -- Sold!, Terry Brooks
• Peopleware, Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco
• Polished Ruby Programming, Jeremy Evans
• God, Technology, and the Christian Life, Tony Reinke*
• The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, John H Walton
• Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, Matti Friedman
• The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin
• The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton*
• The Confessions, Augustine of Hippo*
• End of the Affair, Graham Greene*
• Just Enough Research, Erika Hall
• Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Bertrand Russell*
• Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
• The Complete Stories, Flannery O'Connor
• Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett*
• Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton*
• The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy*