Jon Maddox
Who is Jon Maddox?
Just a guy that loves to make stuff. I love software because it lets me execute on an idea at 3am with zero raw materials. I love mobile dev because of the amazing accessibility of data. I live in Richmond, Va with my amazing wife Steph (@stephmaddox) and pug Tater. I’ve been accused of having excessive opinions but consider that a strength. I’m the loud guy at the bar talking with his hands.
What does your typical day look like?
I get up and brush my teeth, go to the bathroom, go downstairs, make coffee, let the Tater man outside, smoke a cigarette, pour my coffee and go upstairs to my office, in this order. I literally do this exact same thing every morning.
After that I check the Campfire backlogs and stars. The rest of the day is spent hacking on fun, cool, stuff. My actual work day is almost never the same and thats exactly how I like it.
What do you do in your free time?
Embarrassingly, I spend a lot of my free time programming. I have a lot of personal projects for my home and friends. This summer I’ve taken on a project to convert an arcade cabinet. I’ve put a PC inside of it and hooked the controls and arcade monitor to the PC. It runs over 8000 arcade titles as well as a huge library of console games from the NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis. It’s been pretty fun.
Where and when did you start programming?
Like a lot of people, I started with frontend web work. I started making my own websites for fun. I then moved into dynamic stuff like ASP, then on to Java, then on to PHP, then on to Ruby, then on to Objective-C. I’m in love with the web and HTTP. Almost every app I work on for iOS involves it somehow. Being able to do both puts an amazing amount of power in your hands. I freaking love it. Its just so much fun to bust out quick tools.
Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?
Ruby and Objective-C take up most of my time. Nothing bootstraps a project faster than Ruby. Between Sinatra and Heroku and a sprinkle of Redis, its amazing what you can get accomplished in a couple of hours these days. Objective-C is a love hate relationship. There’s a lot in the language I like, and a lot I don’t. But in the end, its an amazing means to an end when you end up with amazingly modern software on your phone.
What OS do you prefer?
Mac OS X of course. Photoshop and a UNIX shell? How is this up for argument?
Current favorite apps?
Desktop: These days I don’t really use any apps on the desktop outside of editors. Propane, the native campfire app, is crucial. Other than that my days are spent in the shell, Textmate, Xcode, Propane, iChat, Chrome, and GitHub for Mac of course.
iOS: Summizer, Instagram, Twitter for Mac, and iTeleport. I use iTeleport almost all day long. I use a desktop at home, and being able to pop on via my iPhone or iPad with iTeleport is HUGE. I can just quickly check messages and campfire in just 2 seconds. Campfire is so bad on the iPad that I actually just VNC into my desktop with iTeleport and use Propane. Sad really.
Small picture for your Workplace?
Name something that has inspired you recently?
Finally deciding to join GitHub. We’ve all been friends for so long and finally ACTUALLY being part of this team is amazing. There’s so many smart, interesting, creative, hillarious , and fun people here, its hard not to be inspired every single day.
What do you prefer? Freelance work or full time employment?
It really depends. Freelance can be fun because you’re working on all kinds of different things. But sometimes its nice to be realllllly married to a project. To give it that sexy love it really needs. The problem is it’s hard to find one of those things.
What are your goals for 2011?
Ship hard, what else?
