João Anes@joaoanes

Hey hey! I'm João Anes. I generally like computers, technology, nerd and online culture, and good, old, senseless ranting (as this bio will make aparent).

Many of the events that added to my world knowledge happened during my journey through college, in my bona fide tour of duty through the integrated master on computer engineering at FEUP. There, I have been enlightened on the true issues in computing, like how C is the superior language and anyone who tells you otherwise probably doesn't distinguish his x86 AMD optimizations from -Wall compiler flags and should not allowed to be near a computer, how CSS was a mistake, however well-intended, and that the people involved should be quarentined to save our future generations, how Android was actually the future all along, even though they screw things up every uneven version, and how vim is really more of a church, complete with cargo cults and messiahs. Interesting tidbits all along.I've also had quite the academic life, representing the students in various leadership boards (I even got to use the title "Senator" for a while!), heading up the image and marketing departments for our academic council for years, as well as being instrumental while organizing events such as ENEI 2013 (www.enei.pt) and the 2nd edition of Talk a Bit (www.talkabit.org).Managing that every-bigger database of mostly useless facts is a ridiculous job not fit for any living soul, but that's the true mark of a professional, and I find it that being amongst my peers in a controlled environment and discussing the great questions of our time (which javascript framework shouldn't you run away from, as fast as you can?) just furthers the cause for everyone.

I have a special place in my heart for programming since I was a little boy, possibly due to my "knack" for system analysis and optimum problem solving (fancy words, right? you should see my CV). I find it extremely rewarding, even though it's grating sometimes. However, almost nothing beats a successful application deployment and seeing everything you've spent hours putting together work as planned, against all odds. This rarely happens. Thank god debugging is half the fun of programming anyway - isn't the devil in the details, aka the poorly incremented iterators that end up accessing random memory and overflowing your stacks, or the dark magic behind all those black box addons you brought along for the ride? Or you know, just Javascript in general? That's the work of the devil right there. I mean sure, throw Flow and ES6 and an unholy amount of webpacking and it's great, but at that point, is it still Javascript?

I've had the chance to work with languages and frameworks both modern and venerable, such as Java, Android Java (still don't quite understand how Google pulled off the heist of a century and stole Java from Oracle) C, Objective C (more like NSC right? I'll show myself out) C++, Ruby (woop woop Rails 5), PHP (before it was cool with all the Laravels), Assembly, Elixir (functional programming will make you live longer, Elixir IS the elixir), and a little bit of Python. I've taken a liking to the pandemonium that is the Javascript landscape, with all its hellish intricacies, from webpacks to yarns to grunts (I'm kidding grunt is dead (I'm kidding nothing is ever dead on JSland)). I've even made a talk last year about React Native which by the way is very excellent if you want multi-OS compatibility.

I've also harbouring a crush for automation for a while, the devops culture and everything that helps me run an entire network using only my phone and an ssh client. From terraforms to puppets, infrastructure setup can be pretty fun, but only if the servers aren't on fire, you're keeping your byzantine generals locked up under armed guard and that pesky background radiation isn't hitting your storage plates. Plus, it does feel pretty great when you manage to stop a system crash by sshing to stuff on the bus.

But life isn't just a neverending sequence of user stories on a perpetually bottomless board/pit, even though it sometimes can feel like it (and might just be the ultimate goal in life, if you ask your friendly neighbourhood project manager).Fortunately, to distract me from that horrible, horrible fact, I've always been a fan of various forms of videogameatic entertainment. That's actually one of the reasons that drew me to IT (I can't escape the "I WANNA MAKE VIDEOGAMES WHEN I GROW UP AND ALSO AN ASTRONAUT" stereotype). Gaming's always been a good source of fun through my life, and I still enjoy rumping through fun games. Plus, all those years of training how to perform SICK headshots have to count for something, sunken cost fallacy be damned.

I like coding for fun sometimes, for example I've coded up my own scanner map for Pokemon Go back when everyone was rushing through public parks in droves, which is open sourced at my github page. I'm currently working on a funny images/shitposts filtering and collection service mostly for archival purposes, as well as developing some support software for D&D sessions (turns out people appreciate things like music, sound effects, persistent logs and whatnot to enhance their immersion!).

There's also TV. It's amazing how TV and Movies ended up copying eachother practically at the same time, and you have movies which are pretending to be TV shows, and TV (or, uh, "it's not TV, it's HBO!") shows basically being Marvel-length massacres of running times. Maybe I just like couches, which is integral to the TV experience.

I'm also quite the shutterbug, and I love my Canon 550D very much, even though I covet the 5D Mark III, which makes my 550D jealous and temperamental whenever we're out together. Fickle mistress.I'm also prolific in Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Illustrator and Sketch (combo breaker!). I play pretend designer/media specialist when nobody's looking, and the results sometimes end up ok! At the very least it's helpful when communicating with actual designers, since there's so few engineers that understand the weird, arcane language that is "designish".

(Also, I'm not sure if "Codebits" still has the "The one who shall not be named" rule attached to it due to copyright concerns, but I attended all events from Codebits V onwards, and every time it was a magical experience. I even presented a couple of talks these past few years! It would sure be a buzzkill if I had to miss this!)

Congratulations, you have managed to read this far, which I'm sure wasn't an easy task. I hope at the very least it was somehow entertaining to read, so thank you for your (apparently plentiful) time, and hopefully(!) see you at the event!Also, here's some cats :3 https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/shitposter-content/content/89687B21BC30CD4C2F26120119A92161