It wasn’t always this way. Over the years, I have started countless projects which never saw the light of day.
In fact they never even came close. I would start a project, get really excited about it but suddenly, out of nowhere, I decided to quit and throw it in — all motivation was lost. When this occurs time and time again, what happens is that before you even start, you feel this inevitable failure onsetting. You think to yourself — “Why bother?”.
Suddenly though, something clicked for me. I found a project that captivated my attention. It was well-defined, fun, and interesting. This particular project was “implement your own interpreted language”, courtesy of craftinginterpreters.com. After completing that, I began…
This is my documented journey of learning a new programming language in 2020. I have not had the urge to learn a new language for quite some time. The last language was Kotlin but I’m not really counting that since I was able to learn it from the comfort of the already familiar JVM. Rust however is a completely new platform that otherwise requires you to leave everything you know behind (unless you inter-op with C, which I am not). It is opinionated and I’m excited about that.
I’m also excited about the notion of documenting my journey as I…
How thinking about architecture can take your code to the next level!
Architecture not code
- The code is a product of the architecture. Depending on how well a system was architected to begin with, will drive the quality of the code. A bad architecture will birth all kinds of hacks in the code to work around the system.
- Identify the root problem? This requires some practice but understanding the deeper constraints of the problem promotes your final solution to be simpler and often reusable.
- Always consider the overall system. Your code does not run in a vacuum. …
Never trade your authenticity for your approval.
As a white person, let alone a white man, I have benefited in ways that I will never be able to comprehend.
It’s impossible to comprehend your privilege, because it’s impossible to experience life without it.
Rewind back to the day I was born, change my skin pigment to black and fast-forward back to this moment — the person sitting here now would be someone that has experienced happiness, love, family, hope and dreams but all in the shadow of an ominous state of fear and anxiety. There’s also the reality I may not even be sitting here at all.
…
To start off, open up your Safari Reading List and see how many items there are that you have said you would ‘read later’. A couple or a few? Is it empty?… No? It’s packed full, isn’t it?
I love Reading List, but I want a better one. The feature has been neglected since it’s first release back in 2012. And I feel motivated to come up with some much-needed improvements.
I feel that the Reading List is a ‘friend-zone’ but I can see the light & I think there’s a way out of it.
The Problems
I tend to refer to…
This is officially my first blog post on medium and I thought I would start it off with something visual.
Lately I have been digging around government websites looking for public data with geospatial properties (data related to location) and, to my surprise, there’s plenty available.
There’s so much public domain data out there allowing citizens to improve their city with technology by building niche user experiences (more on this later).
I also learnt that my local government (Brisbane, Australia) is more technologically present than I gave them credit for: They’ve got a whole site dedicated to open data which…
Jonathon Scanes
Too many interests to list. I love snowboarding, writing code and my amazing wife — www.jnthn.dev
