Rodney Stromlund

Published on 10-12-2026 at 8:29pm

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.