I’m Bill Wear. I’ve spent most of my working life writing — technical documents, tutorials, reference guides, ghostwritten books, training courses, and more code than I expected to when I started out. I’ve written in C, C++, Python, PHP, Perl, and bash. I’ve managed big IT products for big banks and managed engineering programs that probably should have come with a warning label. Through all of it, the thing that kept me hooked was the same: finding the shortest path from “this is complicated” to “oh, I get it.”

Occasionally I take on consulting work — helping software teams explain complex technology to the humans who need to use it. I spent six years as a developer advocate at Canonical, and the better part of three decades before that doing variations on the same thing. Mostly I do this because interesting problems are hard to resist. If you have one, find me at williamowear@gmail.com.

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I’ve also butchered meat, delivered pianos, and run a cash register in my dad’s grocery store as a kid. I researched cancer drugs in college before realizing my biochemistry advisor couldn’t afford to file a tax return, at which point I changed my major to EE/CS and never looked back. And a lot of other things.

These days I write essays, sew things, tinker with shortwave radio, and try to spend as much of my time as possible on work that actually matters to me. I live in south Mississippi with my wife and a Bombay cat named Baby who showed up one day and never left.