From the mats to web development — My story

Hi, I’m Justin. :)

I’ve done a lot of different things in my life, but what I’ve put the most into is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I love to cook and eat food. I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi books. I love dogs, having spent several years volunteering with shelters and rescues, fostering dogs and helping with events.

I’ve always been interested in technology. It all started in 1985 with my dad’s Compaq Portable. Some of my earliest memories are playing Lode Runner and Alley Cat, and learning to navigate around in DOS. Video games and PC building have always been interests of mine, with the former having kept me occupied for most of my teens and 20s.

For ten years, I studied and worked in design and video production. Particularly, motion graphics, illustration, 3D (modeling, rigging, texturing, animation), web design, video editing, and post-production. During that time, I had the opportunity to work with many tools and pieces of software, and I always found scripting and coding to be interesting and engaging.

In my ten years of jiu-jitsu, I’ve learned to handle and embrace challenges, self-doubt, mistakes, and failures as steps toward growth and improvement. I understand now that you will always start at step 1 of anything you want to be good at. Cooking, gardening, painting, reading, socializing, jiu-jitsu, coding, dancing, and anything else you can imagine. You will always start as a terrible, clueless minnow in an ocean of sharks. And that’s something you just have to embrace if you want to improve.

So, why software engineering?

The seed was planted in a computer science class I took during my first year of college in 2001. I ended up transitioning to design a few years later, and used scripting/coding in a very small way, particularly a JavaScript language in AfterEffects and ActionScript in Adobe Flash. Now, I really want to understand how to build website and applications from the ground up, and I hope to be able to leverage my design experience to do some really cool things.

I’d also like to be able to travel and work remotely. Exploring and learning from folks around the world is so exciting to me, and I got a small taste of that when I traveled to the middle of nowhere in Poland in October 2018 for a BJJ Globetrotters camp. Five days immersed in jiu jitsu and learning all kinds of stuff from the folks attending, from mushroom foraging to photography to yoga. I hung around Europe for about 10 days after the camp, training at some schools and exploring out there. To be able to work remotely while adventuring around like that again is a huge goal of mine.

So, here I am. Ready to learn, and ready to grow!