Jon Brown's Stupid Blog for Jon Brown's Stupid Apps

Well, here it is. The beginning. The birth. The genesis. The first real post of any meaning. I think I'm supposed to tell you what this whole site is about and the goals I hope to achieve. How do I do this? Is it a stream of thought thing or should I have written an outline or had a brainstorming session?? I'm just gonna dive in head first.

I've made a huge mistake.

This is the blog for Jon Brown's Stupid Apps (.com). The full blog title is Jon Brown's Stupid Blog for Jon Brown's Stupid Apps. Jon Brown is me and the Stupid Apps are mine. The site is a host for my current and upcoming web projects that have little bearing on the world or my career. They are just for fun and my own experimentation. They do serve a purpose, but that purpose is solely for me.

About a year ago I decided to switch careers from Middle School Chorus Teacher to "something with computers." The main reason for this switch is that Middle Schoolers are the worst. There were other, more well-thought-out reasons, but I won't get into them here. Suffice to say, teaching wasn't "doing it" for me and I thought "something with computers" would.

This is a thing computer experts use.

The reason I say it like that is because, at the time, I just didn't know the right words for what I wanted. I had heard the terms programmer, software developer, software engineer, and others, but had not realized these terms can mean various things depending on who you talk to. In any case, I set out to rediscover coding.


I say rediscover because I had some training in coding from a course in MATLAB at Ga Tech. I knew some basic coding principles and had some markup language skills. I decided to look at some free coding resources and even took some Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). I paid for some certificates from those courses, but I had no sense of what I could actually do with the knowledge I gained. So...


I decided to just get a Master's Degree in Computer Science. It turns out that getting a Master's Degree in a field that is different from your undergrad is very possible. Most schools have ways for you to pursue a new track. I think they just want your money, but it worked out for me. So, here I am. One semester after playing catch up to the kids who already have Undergrad Degrees in Computer Science. I've take classes in Programming, Algorithms, Data Structures, and Databases and I STILL don't know what I can actually do with the information. It's time to just dive in.


Among other projects and experiments, I started this site to host my exploration of web development. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Applets, PHP, Less, Sass, Bootstrap, Blogs, and basic writing skills will all be experimented on and posted on the site. I'll document my success and failures on this blog. I already have two apps up. I'll be posting about those soon.