Mario Ricci

Lead Programmer, Skeptic

This programmer can convince you the world is flat.

If you met him, you may not realize it but Mario Ricci is an introvert.  As such, he doesn’t like talking about himself, so that’s about all the detail on him you are getting.

Finito.

Ok, so since that first paragraph didn’t cut it with my editors, I guess I have to go into depth a bit more. 

Professionally, I absolutely love what I do.  I work mostly on back end code which usually involves .Net and database, but occasionally get into some front end stuff, mostly javascript.  Surprisingly, I get a kick out of requirements.  There is something that gets me about putting yourself in the user’s shoes and making their whole process better, thinking through things logically etc. 

Personally, I enjoy doing almost any outdoor activity (ice hockey, snowboarding, running, mountain biking, kayaking, paintball, fishing, hiking and camping) and thrive on competition.  I also like traveling, enjoy experiencing other cultures and love the beach.  I just recently got into scuba – not such a Colorado sport but it gives me a great reason to go away on vacation.

I am very interested on not just high level theory of how things behave, but the nitty gritty of how they actually accomplish their tasks.  It drives me take apart anything I can – I don’t know where the world would be without screwdrivers and decompilers.   As a result I have a wealth of random useless info in my head that somehow never applies to any trivia games.

Oh yeah, and why do they call me the skeptic? I maintain a good amount of doubt for everything, even those wonderful "facts" that science and the news seem to throw around daily. Stephen Hawking says the following in his book, A Brief History of Time:

"Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory".

I love that – I think people accept things far to easily as concrete fact. He goes on to talk about Newton's theory of gravity being incorrect. Super useful, a wonderfully practical application, but only a reasonable approximation. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.