Hello Beijing Campers!
I guess we no longer need a VPN to idle on Facebook, eh? =D
My name is Shawn, I’m an American expat teaching English in China. I am a CompSci dropout, worked in IT a few years doing work with Exchange and Office 365 in Seattle before realizing that is NOT why I wanted to study computers and I didn’t really know how to get out. So I hit the big red button and started working with kids. Now that I am 28 years old and have been teaching a few years, I am hoping to tap back into those ideals. I don’t want to abandon my experiences as an educator completely because this really has been quite rewarding, I’d just like to work on my problem solving skills, challenge myself in different ways and hopefully find a career that takes me forward for the next several years. I know I can always come back to teaching.
When I was a kid, I was all about Freedom of Information and old school hacker ideals. Now that things have cooled a bit I have a great idea for an Open Source project that I would really like to work on that I believe can really change the ESL market and I think that is equally awesome =D
Information. Education. Freedom. That’s what it is all about, right? The only catch is I will be married soon to a nice girl who has stood by me and while we don’t plan on having children soon I need to think about her and if I am not teaching then I need to find another way to make money.
My goal is to go Full Stack. I learned HTML4 when I was a kid and alot of the ‘nit and grit’ of tweaking a site’s appearance bores me which is why I have elected to wait to finish my Tribute Page and Portfolio until I get farther ahead and can build something more awesome. I am learning primarily through FCC and Treehouse. I like the videos on Treehouse and have followed along through a couple of their practice projects. English coding books are difficult to find, even in Beijing but I find most of the time that when I am reaching for or searching for resources outside of these two I am simply allowing myself to get distracted. The Gitter community here is great as well as the Mozilla Developer Network and W3 Consortium. I am sure I will need more later on and have already been scoping out NodeSchool and other resources, but am relying on the community here to lead me in the right direction.
Wish me luck my sisters and brothers. I hope you all find what you are looking for!