More About Me

I guess this will be my first real blog post. I'm told I'm not actually the greatest writer who ever lived, so I'm going to cheat with my first entry and make it auto-biographical. Not too biographical, though... more self-referential? Just to say I'm not going to bother to write out my life story — I already did that in a draft.

ME

I'm a fairly transparent person. I do my best to be honest. Life is a lot easier that way.

I worry a lot. I guess you could spin that as I like to think things through, but it's definitely a balancing act of not spiraling. For example, as many people do, I have fake — or "preparatory" — conversations with myself. These usually end with me telling the "other person" that I have actually already thought about all of this, even this part where I'm telling them I thought about it and even that part, and so on, and so on. I'm working on it; it's going well.

Probably related to the worrying, I try my best to be considerate. I definitely don't want to be the source of someone's discomfort. I'd really prefer to be the source of their peace. Though, this is also something I'm trying to reign in. I have a list of sayings that have meaning for me and third on that list is "Not everyone has to like you."

Hobbies

It feels weird to describe the things I'm interested in as hobbies. I like learning. I want to be good at a lot of things. I'm currently bad at almost all of those things. I guess those are my hobbies.

Anyway, I want to know more about art, and be good at digital art — writing too. Ideally, I want to fuse digital art with programming. I've had drawing tablets and did some drawing as a kid, but I definitely was not, and am not, naturally talented at it and didn't really have the patience for things that didn't come easy. My wife is a great artist, though, so eventually I'll be able to take advantage of her taste.

I want to learn languages — Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Arabic are on my insanely optimistic list. I've spent 2 years off-and-on studying Japanese. I worked through a list of 2200 basic Kanji, I have the entirety of a Rocket Languages course to get through, and I taught my wife to say "Tagetto wa doko desu ka" for if she ever needed to find a Target in Japan, of which none exist. Additionally, I learned some Spanish in middle school and high school, mostly getting C's. My college roommate was Palestinian... I used to know how to answer the phone and can no longer remember. Lastly, I just started listening to some more K-pop after seeing KPop Demon Hunters. Progress on all fronts!

Last of my learning crusade, programming. I love reading about programming. I love learning new programming languages, concepts, and technology. I love making things! It is my main craft and I'm lucky that it also gets to be my job — heck, I'm lucky to have a passion at all. Many people's passions are not necessarily financially viable as immediately as mine has been. I'm sorry we live in a world where a discussion regarding what we're most passionate about sharing leads to a weighing of if it can sustain us.

I also play video games. Overwatch mostly right now. Used to play League of Legends. I also enjoy coop games, single-player RPGs, etc. I watch TV, anime, and YouTube. I practice typing, switched to Colemak last year. I listen to all kinds of music. Eat good food, cook worse food. Play DnD. Love biking and swimming. And I'm not opposed to most other things!

Career

Last section! Wooooooooo, first blog!

I've had two professional software engineering jobs in my life up to this point.

The first job I worked on two separate stacks that powered two separate internal intranets that served various web apps. The first was a WIMP stack (Windows Server, IIS, MySQL, PHP) and the second was a WIMN stack (..., Microsoft SQL Server, Node). At this job I learned a lot of how and what, very little why. I wasn't doing great financially which made it very hard to pursue additional learning and be excited about programming while working nights at Taco Bell.

I did get to do some fun stuff, though, and I learned a lot about databases. Our first intranet was called VIC (Viking Internal Communication or something like that) and so we named the second VIC-N, for VIC-Node, which we then ended up calling Vixen. I made this fun logo! Which eventually got removed because it confused people... oh, we were a Coca-Cola distributor, by the way.

The second job (current job) came with a relatively ridiculous pay bump and I found a mentor that taught me to learn the how and what all on my own, which I now had plenty of time for. My time at this job really reignited all of my passion for learning. More recently, I've even had a mentee/coworker who has taught me to really introspect on the why. I get to work with so many different technologies and a lot of great people. I'm incredibly grateful for all of the experiences and opportunities pursuing this job has provided me.