NilObject

I am Jonathan Johnson, a 23-year old Web Application developer who works for Gratis Internet. Starting back in first grade with HyperCard on a Mac SE, I quickly went from being a student to helping teachers as I found more time to work on computers. Around third grade, I learned BASIC (you know, 10 print “Home” 20 Print “Sweet” 30 goto 10). Pushing the limits of HyperCard during middle school, I began searching for something more powerful. I found REALbasic, and quickly fell in love.

The Macintosh Toolbox was a very complex thing to learn back in the early 90s. I would have been spoiled to have Carbon back then, but as a budding developer who only knew HyperCard, REALbasic was a perfect fit. I loved the language and the IDE, and continued using it into High School. When OS X first came out, I was caught in the drift of everyone falling in love with Cocoa. I learned it, and enjoyed it for a while, but quickly felt something lacking. During this experimental phase in life, I learned languages such as PHP (which I still use to this day), ASP, Java, and C (with a little C++).

None of the languages felt good. Memory management was always a tricky thing in both C and Objective-C, which although I understood, I would find small errors here and there with either forgetting to free something or freeing something too many times. Java is a nice language, but its tools are lacking and Swing is an example of all things evil and half-way-native-but-not-really. I have no gripes about PHP except for its lack of being able to build applications for the Desktop. That’s why I still code in PHP for the web.

In the end, I came back to REALbasic. I worked at REAL Software four years, and I began getting the 4-year-itch, so to speak. I happened upon Craigslist and found an excellent opportunity, which lead me to where I am today. I love learning new technologies, so shifting from a desktop application toolkit developer to a web application developer has been a great experience. I’ve been lucky that both of my post-college jobs have had excellent teams for me to join.

In my spare time, I am also President of Alacatia Labs, Inc. On the blogs section over there is where I do most of my technical blogging now, and this blog is reserved for slightly more personal topics, although being a geek, those topics are often geeky as well.

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