+-------------+About

~/about_me


mercury man commission by @apple_toast

I'm Jayden, a student at York University. Among other things, I like to read and write computer code.

I've founded York's game development club and have professional internship experience at companies like Scotiabank and Google. You can find my resume (here.)

I've been in love with programming and creating with computers since modifying old Nintendo games and consoles with fan-made hacking tools (don't look for my old starmen.net account, my Earthbound hacks were very bad).

I'm a big beliver in the value of quality software, and developing a holistic understanding of the systems we use to build software. Abstraction should be intentional and deliberate, not simply the default.

A Short list of programmers who inspire me

What I'm up to right now:

I'm writing this on my birthday (09/24), Happy birthday me!

I've been working full time since July, and have been adjusting to full time working life. Work is mostly what I'd describe as "webdev plumbing", simple, important, not super complicated. Working here is very comfortable and compensates me well. In this economy and state of the wider technology industry it's much more than I could ask for or expect. I'm very grateful for the opportunity.

I've somewhat eased into full time working and am very aware of the time I have in my schedule to fit in game development. Ironically I think I've been doing more Game Dev now then when I was a student? Wawaworks has released our Demo Fell Noon. We plan on continuing development so if you're interested, join our mailing list to be updated.

I am also still working on putting together that Retro Homebrew Jam. If this is your first time hearing about it (what? how?) then you can join our discord server here, we're still deliberating on which consoles to jam on but the GBA and N64 have been getting a lot of discussion.

As for the blog: I do a lot of writing in my personal journal and to wawa team members, but so far in this year I've only released one "non JJPA or Favorite things" post. Think my "opinion" posts have slowed down recently simply due to me becoming more knowledgable in the things I write about and realising that these grand realisations I've been having aren't actually that profound or new and other people have known these things for much longer than me? My post are most valuable when they focus on my personal experience that other people could relate to or learn from, I think.

However, I might release that JRPG post soon-ish? I will be doing an exhaustive analysis of the genre and the design of "menu combat" in general for our Fell Noon, as it has menu combat and I would like it to be fun and interesting. The act of long form writing, although fun, does take a long time. I'm not sure when I'll have the chance to turn any of my discoveries and theories public and coherent, maybe when we're neck deep in development and I can trick everyone into believing that it's actually a form of marketing.

Other than that, I've been living the best I can, I hope you're all living the best you can too. Be grateful for what you've been given and use it to it's fullest, but help out those who have less, too.

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