Jonathon ANTHONY


Jonathon here, speaking in the first person.


I'll start with a story. It's the memory of the first and last time in my intellectual upbringing I received positive re-enforcement. I think it went far. This was prior to the 90's and aughts, before psycho-reality-TV shows taught you how to communicate and deepen sympathy with your little dog. It was my first-grade year at Dildine Elementary School, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Our class was making a presentation. Each of us kids was to stand next to the kneeling teacher, holding up the thing we brung in, homework some would call it, in front of a photographer from the major daily, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. I don't remember the paper or the homework. The photographer instructed each of us to hold up our homework and look at the teacher for the photo. All of the kids followed this direction, except myself. I looked at the camera. The next day my picture was on the front page of the newspaper.


My age is 30. I was born the upper New York, but moved immediately to Wyoming, where I lived for the next 7 years. Then I moved to California to live on a remote Air Force Base, where they test fire long range missiles. The geography consisted of canyons, cliffs, a rocky, natural coastline. The missiles were intercontinental, as well as extra-planetary. Then I moved to Colorado Springs for high school and learned what a vast cultural waste was mine to inherit as an adult. Learned is not the right word. It's not a thing I can describe in a single word, except maybe "realization." But you can't realize until after the fact. As soon as I was able, I fled that place and moved to Chicago, where I would spend the next decade. I learned about politics and "independent music", and met Angeline. I now reside in Los Angeles, but that is temporary.


I spent 18 years of my life in public education, including as a teacher and administrator. I served 3 years within the Chicago Public School district, during which time it was my job to be physically present and oversee certain No Child Left Behind initiatives at over 100 of the district's most neglected schools. The experience taught me a lot about the political and bureaucratic machinery that oppresses--practically vitiates--the institution of public education. I already empathized with the invisible students; I knew from experience that public school was basically extended detention. When I worked opposite side of the fence, I began to empathize with the teachers and administrators, for all of us were under a thousand thumbs. I realized the only way I could help the situation was to leave, and come back better prepared.


I finally dropped out of public school at the age of 26, to learn how to read, write, and hack. Public Education is one of my main missions, and one of the reasons I decided to learn web and network technology. And, lo, learning things reinforced my devotion to education. Believe it! I would have been saved many unmemorable trials if the public school system had taught me about computer science, or anything useful.


Although Wikipedia is incomparably better than the mass-produced textbooks and Lumpen-Proflitariat Histories written by Pearsons or McGraw-Hill, I don't believe in panaceas. Technology helps people help themselves, and that's a pretty good thing for when the "system" fails, as it is. Also, I sense that technology will be a strong political emetic, and that will be a boon to all people who want to raise higher the independent, secular, social cause of public education.



Work History

If you took the yearly income earned for each of my adult years, the average would not be above $12,000 per annum. My highest single-year income to-date: ~$22,500, gross, working as an "independent contractor", which means that some of the pay was reimbursement for things like gas and supplies. That year, I saved $5000, quit my job, and lived off my modest savings for a very long time. That's when I started thinking about the Internet enterprise. Prior to this point I'd had many inventive ideas for contraptions and systems the world is still not ready to adopt. The Internet front-to-back became something I actually practiced, wanted to master, joining an extremely short list comprised of charming, poetry and martial arts.


From ages 7-28 I worked perhaps three-dozen jobs, and was fired from the majority. Was I a bad employee? Depends on if you ask the employees or the manager. After a while on a job, when I had accumulated sufficient cash reserves (a few months' rent), I would begin to neglect my duties, especially the duty of acting politely subservient to managers. Half of all my jobs were restaurant or hospitality service, or nearly a decade-worth of my employment "career".


My first job, during elementary school, was newspaper delivery boy. I slung the double-sided sack across my handlebars, rather than around my neck, and rode my route, accompanied by my dog. My mother kept account of things so the paper's delivery managers didn't screw me out of tips and commissions. It mostly got worse. Among all the types of jobs I have held, unordered:





Current


For a while I didn't know if I could ever understand programming. I thought it would be as daunting as learning Chinese. I made my own syllabus, but all credit belongs to the Internet throngs. Thinking as I did that I would be lucky to ever attain any skill at programming, I was strategic in my research. I read more than I wrote, only dipping into code for the random assignment or to test something. My goal was to figure out which language would best suit somebody who has a natural disability with syntax. Ruby looked good. PHP did not. I feared that I might be able to grasp only one language and master it, so I wanted to be certain. I had already learned CSS and HTML, but I did not then have an encompassing grasp of the DOM and Window Object, especially with regard to Javascript. I'm a pixel-perfect CSS coder, on at least a couple browsers.


I started reading about new "document databases" long before I ever used one. I started following the Node.js phenomenon very early, before I knew anything about functional or object-oriented programming. I read a lot of documentation I didn't fully understand, things like "WTF is a SuperColumn?" (thrice), but discovered that as I came back to them, more bits became comprehensible. I was piecing together a round education, not just in programming, but in software and network architecture. I concluded that if Javascript is going server-side, that will be my language of choice. I read me some book. Eventually, around Node version-0.2.x, I jumped in.


Now I practice many command-line utilities, linux variations, MongoDB and Redis (the latter was my first database). I haven't scaled your SuperColumns, yet, Cassandra.


I am currently building and running multiple test server environments for the Node.js apps we are building at NHQ. We will be using Node.js for everything in the foreseeable future.


Many thanks to all the people making node.js and all the totally indispensable open-source modules that make it a joy to work with. That is all.