john coder

My name is John Nelson, and I live in Jamestown, NY. Computers interested me from a very young age, working on Apple IIGS in elementary school. The first programs that I wrote were on a TI-83 calculator in my high school Algebra class. During high school I learned HTML and some JavaScript on my own. I enjoyed the satisfaction I got from seeing code work, which eventually led me to the computer science department of Clarion University of Pennsylvania. There I started programming in C++. Writing simple puzzles and file I/O programs were fun, but my class on data structures had me deeply interested. As a freshman I discovered a tiny organization called Techfloor. It was a group of computer science students that worked on projects for fun. It was with those guys that I started working with ASP.NET and C#.

The summer after my sophomore year of college I had an internship at Libera, Inc. It was a pleasure to have worked there, because I strongly believe it was an invaluable experience. Since it was a small company and my first job, I had a little niche of influential professional figures. There was Mike Dearman, who wrote their System 7 platform with the .NET Framework. Glenn Rosenbrock was my immediate superior, and refined a lot of my SQL skills. Kris Mitchell was one of the first people that seemed to believe in me at a work setting.

After graduating a semester early in 2008, I landed a job at Gateway Ticketing Systems, Inc. as a web programmer. Steve Hook and Todd Bumbarger (friends from Techfloor) said some really nice things to help me get the job.

Since then, I've hopped a couple of jobs. I currently work at NBC News Digital, on the Platform team.

Why do you blog?

It’s a selfish attempt to improve myself on both professional and personal levels. Shortly after starting my job at Gateway Ticketing in January of 2009, I had an itch to learn. The itch was inspired by reading blogs by the likes of Scott Hanselman, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and Jon Skeet (among others). These guys love their jobs as much as I do. With this in mind, my friend Steve Hook and I started our own internal blogs at Gateway. At first I had a lot of fun with it, posting about this and that. Only a few people cared to skim my blog at work, so I decided to go live with my blogging career. Enter: johncoder.com. Wait, you mean your last name ISN’T Coder?

Very astute observation. John Coder is an idea that I had one day. “John Q. Public” or “John Smith” is the generic personae, right? Well, “John Coder” is your generic coder personae. Ironically, a generic coder is the last thing I want to be. This blog is my attempt at avoiding that terrible label.

I am eager for any kind of feedback (albeit positive or negative, as long as it’s tasteful). I encourage you to send me an email at jnelson@johncoder.com or follow me on twitter @johncoder.