Javier E. Fajardo

_{A "Hello World" C program running on a Unix PC (source)}

(First post!)

Hey there, my name is Javier! I'm a Software Developer that graduated in Computer Engineering from Concordia University. I'm originally from Caracas, Venezuela where I lived my entire life before coming to Montreal, Canada and starting my undergrad at age 17. I've been the past five years in Canada and pretty much made my entire life in what has been nothing short of an amazing experience.

Why start a blog?

Well, the idea started a long time ago. I was pretty bored and one day I decided to take my really rusty web dev skills and make my own personal site. That was about a year and a half ago now, while I was on an internship in Vancouver with The Coalition. I had thought about starting a technical blog back then, but I was focused on other things (and I really, really did not want to keep writing Javascript). I also didn’t know what I could write about that would be worthwhile. Even though I knew enough content to have profound technical discussions with people, I was never too sure of what could be interesting enough to write (and for other people to read). Then a lot of other things began to pop-up at work and kept me busy. I put the idea in the backburner and it stayed there as I went back to Montreal to finish my Undergrad....

But after graduating in June 2017, I suddenly had a lot of free time. Actually, more free time than I ever wanted. Also, no longer being a student meant that I would be spending less time in places where I could discuss programming with other people (outside of work). So, I started reading technical blogs over the summer and tried cleaning up my old Twitter account to see what was out there. I wanted to stay up-to-date with ongoing developments in the field and try out some new stuff. But I also wanted to share some of the interesting things I had seen so far in something longer than 150 characters. So, eventually, I got inspired and decided I had enough free time to pick up my project again to see if I could set up a blog platform and start writing. Maybe I could get some good feedback on what I’d found interesting and hopefully learn something new in the process.

Start Me Up

Right from the get-go, I was put off from working on Wordpress again. We had used it once as the platform for SCS Concordia and it proved to be a pain, with a mess of plugins and rampant vulnerabilities. Maybe I could get one of the newer versions and not deal with plugins so it could all be up-to-date and secure, but I didn’t try. Other common blogging platforms didn't seem too different from Wordpress. Though I admit I did not look much in the way of out-of-the-box, user-friendly software nor places like Medium. I wanted to have something that was self-hosted and could tweak as needed. My website was already running Django under the hood, so I decided it would be better to find a plugin or package that could implement a Content Management System. After a rather long search and much testing, I decided on using Puput, a simple Django add-on with blogging in mind. And so, this blog went into my server on July 2017.

_{Mandatory XKCD Comic on blogging  (Source)}

After setting everything up, I wrote some stuff, but never published it. Unfortunately, I never got to polish what I wrote and I was also dissatisfied with what I had been writing. Moreover, my mind was elsewhere as there was a lot happening towards the end of the summer. I moved about 5 times over the span of 3 months, working out of my laptop and carrying suitcases and boxes back and forth. But I'd finally move to Vancouver in September, start work in October and get to settle down in November. Time passed by pretty quick, but I was determined not to throw this into the backburner again. So, I decided on a launch date: January 1st. It was my New Year's Resolution to write something up, polish it and post it. And so, I did! My first “real” post (other than this one) is about managing my Lists of Lists and learning Go in the process.

What you’ll find here

A lot of the content will be technical and, most likely, computer science or engineering related. My hope for this project is to write, share it here and (if possible) get feedback on it to improve. And so keep on writing. However, there are other hobbies I'll regularly write about, like hiking, swimming, anime, video games and even papercraft. You might also find me talking a bit about politics because my home country, Venezuela, has been in political unrest since 1999. At the time of writing, Venezuela is undergoing one of its most troublesome moments and remains a source of concern to expats like me who still have immediate family living within the country.

Hopefully you like the stuff I write about and that motivates you to do or try it out on your own! I'll try to post something new every other week depending on how work goes and how busy the week has been. If you have any suggestion as well, leave them in the comments or reach out to me. I'm always open to feedback and learning new things.

Just remember: anything written in this blog does not represent the opinions of my employer or of any group/entity that I work with!

Cheers!