About Me

My name is Stuart Ainsworth, and I’m a geek. Used to be a database geek, but now I’m a full-stack managerial geek.

Mmmm, dat’s good!

I’ve had this domain name for a long time, and many people often ask me “why codegumbo?”  The name comes from many influences:

I grew up in Northeast Louisiana, and even though I live in Georgia now, I still think of Louisiana as home.  When I was a kid, my favorite meal was my memaw’s gumbo; even now, I can still remember how good it tasted.  Gumbo represents home, and all that’s good in the world.

As a database developer, good code is like gumbo; everybody brings a different spin to it, but you have to have a variety of flavors to have a really good soup.  You need to have a good stock (SQL), but you also gotta add some spices (a little VB in SSIS, an understanding of the application process hitting the DB, maybe some javascript and HTML stored in your tables).  Gumbo represents variety, and dat’s good, ya’ll.

Gumbo is also one of the main dishes of the Cajun and Creole cultures; I am neither Cajun nor Creole,  although I have a great fondness for that which is not my own.  I started out in life as a disk jockey, moved on to public health, and wound up a database professional.  Gumbo represents an evolution, an adoption of something which is not native to me.