My Journey

About Me

Hello! My name is JJ but my online friends call me warmaster (sometimes spelled warmastr when some schmuck beats me to the registration for it) and I'm a beginning programmer. This journal, if you will, is intended to capture my thoughts and feelings as I go through my journey as a budding developer. My hope is that through my struggles, frustrations, successes, and joys, they will become your inspiration to find success in whatever it is you are doing. I probably should have a schedule for these and stick to it, but I don't, and I won't. So, when I feel like writing, I will come here and let it all go.

So, who am I? I am a father, a husband, and a patriot. I have a beautiful wife and three lovely girls all in double digit age ranges who keep me busy with softball, theater, and gymnastics events. I was a 17 year member of the Army National Guard, and was medically retired in 2019 after a wonderful career with three overseas deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait, along a stateside stint at Tinker, AFB for two years. I am entitled to my opinion about the politics of this country having done my part to contribute. Along with being medically retired, the VA is allowing me to go back to work and I needed to find something that would work with my disabilities so I chose my first passion in life, programming.

As a young child, around eleven years old, my uncle gave me my first computer. A Commodore 64 and a BASIC programming book. I was hooked. Every day after school, I would be sitting in front of that monitor with the book open in my lap pounding away at that over sized keyboard inputting code, line by line. I can't tell you how many times I typed something wrong and had to start over, and this was before we had internal hard drives and simple file saves. I had a tape drive and didn't know how to use it to save files. So, I'd start over, back at it again, bent over and finger pecking my way to a working piece of code.

Those memories are among my favorite. I loved learning how to make a hot air balloon animate its way across the screen, and when it finally did work, what a joyous moment. I showed my mom, a big smile on my face. From then on, I've never been without a computer. These days, I build my own by I owned several Packard Bells, Gateways, Dells, and even HP computers over the years.

Over the course of my life, I've only dabbled in programming, sidetracked by my love of video games and not interested enough in programming early on to mix the two. I don't have any regrets in life really, but I would definitely have learned programming over playing games had I known then what I know now about myself.

That really doesn't matter to me though. Every twist and turn in my life has gotten me here, to this very point, where in just a few minutes after writing this, I get to learn new concepts in manipulating the DOM in JavaScript. A week ago, I wouldn't have known what a DOM was unless you were referring to my cousin Dominique who I always called Dom.

Before I tell you where I am today, let me tell you where I was. I was "one of those people". Who is that you ask? I'll be glad to tell you! I was one of those that jumped from language to language, free course to free course, video tutorials to books. I've tried it all. From C (coincidentally a class I'm currently enrolled in at my university), to PHP, Java to C++, C# to JavaScript, and I'm just warming up. My problem was, that I didn't finish anything. When things got hard, I got soft. I chocked it up to "there's no one to ask". In a lot of cases that was true, but at a certain point in my years of existence, we became better and better about networking on topics such as these and I just chose not to follow through. That all changes right here and right now.

In my next entry, I will cover where I am today! If you've read to this point then "bless your sweet little heart" as they say in the south! Until the next one, be good!

Photo by Pille Kirsi: https://www.pexels.com/photo/empty-wooden-pathway-in-forest-1009355/