Hi! My name is Jérôme Gravel-Niquet. A quick post simply to introduce myself and give you a brief overview of what this blog will be all about. A word of caution: My English is the result of discussing, reading and listening incessantly to the language while working my way up the ladder in web development. I’ve gotten better, but please don’t mind the small errors I might make whilst writing my mind to depletion.
My story
Throughout the earlier years of my life, nothing abnormal, a simple life anyone would expect through elementary school and high school. It’s a funny thing to talk about my life in terms of academia, since I now completely refrain from adhering to this blatantly failing system, but… more on this later. At the age of 19, I decided to try my luck as a web designer and got luckily hired the same week.
Much before that though, my brother had introduced me to computers and Internet at an early age, it was the beginning of an addiction to information and knowledge inception. At first it was purely entertainment, later as a replacement for school, a work tool and a money generating machine. At around 13 years of age, I decided to build my first site, it was in Flash and I was very excited. Ironically, I haven’t touch much Flash afterwards. In a few years, I came to the realization that I could convert pure graphics into HTML / CSS layouts. Years of less socially active life and as much machine interaction a human may support, my knowledge extended to many different programming languages, advanced web designing techniques, a primer of web marketing and project management. At the time of this writing, I am 21 years old, alive and kicking, I live on the web and I browse real life from time to time.
Subjects
Hopefully, you won’t be surprised to know this blog will mostly be about web development and a deeper understanding of the WWW itself.
Chances are I will be talking a lot about UX, Ruby, Agile project management, Internet philosophy and how life-changing it is.
I can’t say I know it all about these subjects, but I know my fair share and I’d like to make you benefit from my various writings. The Internet is a complex world, finding your way in it all is difficult and takes years. My job has been to facilitate the experience, in its whole, of browsing and using the web, this blog’s purpose follows this line of thought.
Why I decided to write now
As I wrote earlier, the web is a complex system and I’m just recently confident enough in my skills and knowledge to discuss them without fear of misleading anyone.
Experience
Through my efforts, I built countless websites, troubleshooted an extremely large quantity of problematic situations in a lot of different fields, made research on ever-deeper subjects and therefore have gain significant experience in many fields. I also have gained “ok” experience in a lot of fields, but it’s the convergence of them all, harnessed to define true experience in an all-encompassing complex field of work: Web development.
I am opinionated
My opinion is what defines me in this world. There’s too much to learn, so much that you have to choose and this is where your opinionated view of the world comes into play. Which philosophies to adhere to? Does this new knowledge fit with your views? Who has the best opinion? There’s no real answer to this last one.
The only way to truly forge an opinion is to try as many “things” as you can. Other people’s experience is always good to know and can give you insight on what’s awaiting you if you try the same thing, but you need your own experience of it to tell if it fits. Somewhat like the scientific method, observation and experimentation are key to succeed at finding the best solution for yourself, for your specific context.
Technicalities of this blog (for those interested)
I forked Adam Wiggins’ Scanty over at github and modified it to my likings. It was pretty old so I had to modify a few deprecated things. Here’s my fork/version (if you peak at my profile, I don’t have much yet, but I’ll soon add more, I promise!)
More precisely, this blog uses: Ruby, Sinatra, HAML and Textile.
I devised my own theme, an experiment in typography, as I didn’t like very much the one that came from Adam. Honestly, I often want to build my own stuff and I hacked his blog software quite a lot. Not out of necessity for it to work, but out of necessity for me to continue learning. Forever.
Coming up
I have a few blog posts lining up, I should post about what I call “smart websites”, about the school system and how it’s now a failure, how to do efficient research and some bits here and there about my projects.
Stay tuned!