Hi Steemit 🙂 Learning Japanese and Web Development in LA, DC, Japan, NYC, ATL, HI

Hello Steemit!

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I’m a 32 year old guy from the US. I’ve been all over the place for the past 10 years. I grew up in the DC area, went to college in Atlanta, grad school in upstate New York, worked in New York City, taught English in Japan, went to school again in Hawaii, and then worked in commercial production in LA.

The thing that has driven me the most since college is learning new things. For a long time it was Japanese, but I recently shifted gears into web development, and now cryptocurrency too.

Learning Japanese / Moving to Japan

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I started studying Japanese as a hobby while in grad school in 2007 and it quickly turned into something I put a lot of time and effort into. I’ve taken breaks from studying over the years, but it has remained a pretty big part of my life.

After studying for about 3 years, I moved to Japan to teach English. I was there for a year, including during the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Fortunately, I was far enough away not to be in any danger, but we lost power for a few days and had a minor gas/food shortage. There were also daily aftershocks for months after the big quake, which made life pretty intense as someone who had never experienced an earthquake before moving to Japan.

I actually planned on staying for at least another year, but my company lost the contract in the town I was working in. I decided to come back to the States because there was a chance I would be relocated near the areas affected by the nuclear power plant disaster.

Despite all of this, Japan is still one of my most treasured experiences. It’s a really interesting place and I got to meet so many nice people. I can’t wait to go back.

Back to My Tech Roots

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I studied civil engineering in undergrad and grad school, and have always been very interested in technology, math, and science. Learning Japanese might seem like a strange detour from this, but it’s actually the combination of the two that has been so fun. Finding new technology and new logical approaches to something I’ve never been very good at (learning foreign languages) has been a really fun challenge to overcome.

This year I finally decided to shift gears a bit to study web development. It was my favorite class in college, but I wasn’t willing to change majors at the time. I’m currently enrolled in the flex program at Thinkful, studying to become a web developer full-time (learning the MERN stack). I’m hoping to be done with the program around the end of March. The picture above is of my first project -- a Japanese dictionary built in HTML/CSS/Javascript/jQuery with API calls for the word and kanji info.

Looking Forward

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I love that I’ve been able to learn so many new things since graduating from college. Education is already so much more accessible thanks to the internet and all of the people creating courses for free or cheap. I would love to contribute to the wealth of resources out there and help people learn the things I find so interesting.

I’ll probably be blogging primarily about learning Japanese and web development, as well as some more general education stuff and topics related to crypto as I learn about it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I’m looking forward to interacting with everyone on Steemit. 🙂