About
Hi, I'm Johannes. In this blog as with most other online communications and all things coding I go with my intials - jmc - as my full name is more reserved for alert situations, government documents or job applications.
I am currently on parental leave from a job in media monitoring, and in my free time (that I also share with my kid, my cat and my partner) I am studying to become a web developer - which I will write about as I go. Especially since I am currently attending a bootcamp for web development by Ironhack, I think there won't be a lack of content to complain about.
A bit more about myself: I'm a 32 year old German, husband, dad, animal companion, and I have a few different hobbies. I used to like doing a thousand things and none of them right, but after a brief brush with theories in the field of degrowth I personally choose to do fewer things but trying to do those well.
One of these is obviously programming - I LOVE coding. What I do not love so much as need is running (but only if it's not raining and if I'm not down with a cold or something).
I really enjoy drumming, and after a longer hiatus from serious practicing (about 15 years) I rediscovered working on my technical drumming skills early in 2022, and I'm enjoying it tremendously. With drumming also came a "diversification" of my musical taste - in a sense, since it's still mostly metal I like to listen to. But I definitely went out of my way to get some cool old/new bands in there (I mean, like Lamb of God or The Mars Volta, or one of my favorites, The Dillinger Escape Plan, or Dave Weckl, who joined my favorites like Slipknot, KraftKlub, Demons & Wizards, Kreator and Heaven Shall Burn, just to name a few).
Reading. Reading has always been very big with me, and I enjoy the paper kind over the e-paper kind, but I do both - at times more intensely than others. Currently, I'm into REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, because I just love everything I have set my eyes on by that man ever since I read Cryptonomicon. Right before that I read all seven Potter books for the umpteenth time (actually just the third time in English, but overall including the German books it must be like the tenth read-through) - but I also enjoy non-fiction (right before Potter it was Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Antiracist, and Four Hundred Souls is currently lying on my desk.)
I like cooking, but not in a way where I would cook for hours and call that an enjoyable time. I know how to cook and what I like, and then I do that and the food tastes good, but that's it.
I'm a vegan, and I follow ethical veganism wherever possible. I strongly advocate for animals rights and a stop to the exploitation of any animal, be it human or farm. I volunteer with an NGO to make vegan farming more known and normalized in the field of agriculture.
But overall, and what this blog will probably see the most of, is coding-related stuff. After I dabbled with Python a bit (with Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed Shaw) I kind of lost track with coding, but the seed was planted. Earlier in 2022 I actually sat down again and started forming the idea of how it would be if this was my thing, I something involving coding could be what I do for a living - and that gave me a huge boost of motivation. I grabbed books and tutorials, wrote little web pages and looked at them in the browser, and I was just awed that everything, every little thing on the internet and how we use the internet, is basically just code, just lines of text that powers everything. And that notion is very powerful to me. You can do whatever on the internet - and after I had worked with WordPress a bit and was in contact with a web developer who's job it was to provide solutions for people's web-based needs - it clicked again. That's what I want to do. At least for a while, and then on, and more. And then there are millions of possibilities, so many languages, so many things to create.
Yeah, so - that's me, and I hope you will enjoy the ride with me.
jmc