Published: 2022-11-25
Welcome
I’m really glad you’re here. I’ll use this post to introduce myself and what to expect from this blog.
My name is JJ Vega (short for Joseph Vega Jr). I currently reside in Signal Mountain, Tennessee with my wife (Meg) and two dogs (Olive and Ruth). By trade, I am a frontend web developer (though I’m frequent friends with the backend as well) and work as a coding instructor for devCodeCamp, a software development and data analytics bootcamp. My role there has been as instructor, then lead instructor, and now primarily content and curriculum developer.
To be frank, I’m not sure what I want for this blog. I know that I’ve wanted a writing space I could call my own for a long time. Inspired by James Clear’s twice weekly writing habit, I’ve been making it a routine to post on LinkedIn at least once per week and realized that I loved sharing my thoughts with writing. My hope is that I can use this space to develop my presence online and share my knowledge across the domains that are important to me.
I divide my interests amongst four primary buckets:
Coaching is one of my favorite disciplines and is something I do frequently with students I teach. Often, I’m not “telling” them what to do or think, but using our coaching space to help them come to their own solutions and conclusions about what to do next. An instructor is at their best when they are creating space for a student to become more self-sufficient and resilient.
Rewilding comes from Tony Riddle, one of my biggest inspirations. Tony is a lifestyle coach residing in England who espouses a philosophy of natural living that syncs the human being closer to their biological norms. This means that I try to avoid sitting in chairs too much, spend more time on the ground in resting positions, apply breathwork to regulate my nervous system, and spend time outside as frequently as possible to “tune in” with Nature. In my opinion, Tony is a visionary and presents a framework for living more fully in our current modern, distracted world.
Web Development is my primary trade and craft. I attended the bootcamp I currently work in over two years ago. Before that, I had some background in digital marketing and managing my former company’s website and fell in love with user experience and user interfaces especially, self-teaching my way to some level of skill. Doing a bootcamp helped me formally level up those skills and exposed me to concepts and structure that I otherwise would have never been able to provide for myself.
My main interests in web development fall around the frontend, specifically using JavaScript-based approaches to develop complex interfaces and experiences. I had a massive “a-ha” moment when I learned Redux and the pattern it espouses for dealing with predictable state change, and can say with confidence that dealing with state is one of my favorite things to do in a project (along with the visual element of turning a design into a living, breathing interface). There’s something about the human element of interaction and what happens behind the scenes to facilitate that interaction that fascinates me.
Then of course, there’s my family. Moving to Signal Mountain was all about getting my family to a place where we could thrive, and I truly couldn’t ask for a better home.
That’s it for this post. Here are a couple of links I’d like to share from Tony Riddle that provide more details around his philosophy and some of his better tips. As someone that sits in front of a computer for long periods of time, they’ve been a wonderful counterbalance to what is a fundamentally unnatural (but fun!) experience.
The Natural Lifestyle Philosophy: