The Beginning

Just what the world needs, yet another technical blog!

My name is John Novak and I’ve been working as a professional programmer ever since I left uni in 2003. In those last 12+ years I have worked in a variety of industries using lots of different programming languages, most notably C, C++, Java, Python, C#, JavaScript and PHP. I’ll spare you from the gory details, you can check out my LinkedIn profile if you’re really that interested.

During my teenager years I was fairly involved with the Amiga and PC demoscene as a graphician and musician. That was also the time when I taught myself coding in Pascal, x86 assembly and C as a hobby (in that exact order). I still write music in my spare time and do photography, plus occasionally dabble in design (such as the visuals of this blog).

In the last 5+ years, my programming jobs involved me to focus quite heavily on the server-side development side of things, mostly in Java and now recently in Scala. While that’s a very interesting and rewarding area to work in with a lot of depth to it, I’ve come to realise that it’s just too easy to fall into a comfortable routine and become an expert in an area while simultaneously missing out on all the exciting new stuff that’s happening in the world of programming outside your particular niche.

And that’s the main motivation for starting this blog—to keep myself up to date on new technologies that interest me and document my tinkerings. The idea is that using the blog format to report on my experiments will help me focus and also make me more diligent in researching my topics. After all, the goal is to write about things that are new to me, so trying to keep the amount of misinformation I’m unwillingly (but inevitably) going to spread to a minimum is probably a good idea, as I’m sure the experts will be far too eager to chime in and correct me… :)

Having said that, don’t hesitate to point out any of my factual mistakes in the comments. In fact, I’d be glad if you did and I encourage you to do so because I’m here to learn. That offer stands for correcting my grammar as well as English is not my first language.

Alright, enough of rambling about myself already, see you in the next post!