Who?
Simon Jakowicz, although since discovering SSX tricky in the early noughties, Psymon has been my goto nickname. I’m a little fast and furious when it comes to tech. I get bored easily, so my blogging can be a little sporadic.
History
I’ll be frank, not the guy from crackheads anonymous, just honest. My history involves spending a large amount of time on various holidays. That’s clearly way more interesting than where I’ve worked and what apps I’ve meddled in, right. So I’ll just say, I bloody love the sun, which is obviously why I live in the sunshine capital of the world – London.
Hobbies
Most people reading this are probably some fork of computer scientist, but for those who aren’t, I’ll reveal a little secret to y’all. Despite the stereotypical developer being a guy who sits in a dark room, wielding a keyboard and a six grand coffee machine, not many of us are anything like that. In fact I bloody hate the taste of coffee, it’s truly vile stuff and as I’ve already mentioned, I’m best mates with that massive tanning machine at the center of our solar system. The upshot being, I generally only lock myself in a dark room, when recovering from a night painting the town.
So what do I actually do with my free time? Well. Beers and burgers, weights and dates, cars and bars, all interests of mine, but still not my hobbies. Music has to top the list for me, I love seeing live music. I can’t dance for shit, but I’ll always boogie a little if the right beat drops. I’ve played tennis for almost 10 years; I’m a gooner; I own a guitar but can’t play it; I own a plastic guitar and a copy of guitar hero… which I can play; I have two cats, seven wives and a teddy bear. OK I confess I don’t have any wives.
Blog Eat Blog
You may have noticed my most recent blog posts have been focused around NoSQL. About a year ago, I thought it would be a smart idea to write a series on MongoDB. Wrong! It took me a year to conjure the motivation to write the entire series, but it’s finally over. Expect blogs from now on to be way more omnifarious, cool and hopefully a lot more frequent.
Love
Recently I started developing in Ruby and it has to be said, it was almost love at first sight. I’m sure I’ll be Ruby blogging in no time. I’ve always loved PHP as a language, I’ve been writing it for 12 years now, there will always be haters, but I don’t generally mingle with these shallow-minded people. Admittedly Rasmus Lerdorf was probably stoned when he chose some of those function names, but it hasn’t killed me yet. I also go through patches of doing a lot of JavaScript. Docker and its astronomical ecosystem is another love of mine right now, I’ll blog about it when I discover something which hasn’t been written about 8,000 times already.
Party Tricks
Unfortunately I can’t mix the perfect Manhattan, blindfolded, with my hands behind my back. But I do know every capital city in the world and I can name the 50 united states and draw them on a map. Contrary to common belief, I sucked at this sort of stuff not too long ago.
Favourite Quotes
“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” ~ Emo Phillips
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door” ~ Milton Berle
“Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.” ~ Albert Einstein