Hello, Blogosphere!

After much consideration, I’ve finally decided to start a blog. One reason is to expand my writing skills (I don’t write nearly enough), but the main reason I’ve decided to do so is because I now have my own space on the Internet to write about, well, anything really.

I suppose this is the obligatory mini-biography post, so here goes. I’m a high school student living in Vancouver, Canada. I quite enjoy school, which I suppose is a good quality. I play the piano, and my favourite sport (to play) is Ultimate Frisbee, which is apparently very popular in the Pacific Northwest, something I wasn’t aware of until I started playing. Music is one of my passions, and I enjoy composing music in my free time. I’m also very interested in programming, and there’s quite a story behind how I became interested in it.

One Christmas, I got an iPod Touch as a present from my parents. It was a first generation iPod Touch, only running iPhone OS 1.1 at the time (it wasn’t even called iOS back then). It was an amazing device, but the issue was there were no apps for it. The concept of third-party apps wasn’t even existent. iPhone OS 1.1.3 added “Web Clips”, which were essentially pseudo-apps, or in other words, glorified bookmarks. What was truly amazing, though, was the release of iPhone OS 2.0. This OS update contained the debut of the App Store, and it was outstanding. The fact that you could find a game that looked interesting, buy it, and have it playable within a matter of minutes was mind-blowing. To put icing on the cake, the highly awaited games such as Enigmo and Super Monkey Ball were only $10 each, much less than games on any other console (although now, they’re $1 and $3 respectively; that’s a blog post for another time). Most apps and games were around the $3–5 range at the time, and only your Apple ID password stood between you and a shiny new program for your iDevice.

When I learned that, unlike the other game consoles at the time, there was essentially no barrier to entry for programming iOS apps, I immediately checked it out. I downloaded Xcode and the iPhone SDK and messed around with it. I made very rudimentary apps, but nothing at all that was App Store-worthy. Eventually, I found a tutorial that explained how to make a basic Breakout-esque game, which I was pretty proud of. However, I soon realized that while I could follow a tutorial, I wasn’t able to code on my own. I took a break from Objective-C for a while, and got a book on C. I also bought the PDF version of Learn Python the Hard Way, and worked my way through it. While I’m gaining a better grasp on the concept of coding, I’m still nowhere near being a programmer; I’m slowly working on it though! As of now, I’ve decided to take a break with learning how to program, and instead focus on other things, like making this blog.

After having the idea to start a blog, I researched various blogging platforms, but it quickly became evident that I should use WordPress. Between being open-source, having the ability to be a CMS as well as a blog, and having a native-iOS app that I can potentially contribute to in the future, I knew it was the right choice. I’m currently hosting my website with the great guys at Laughing Squid, and here I am now.

At the moment, there are a few things I still need to take care of. Firstly, I need a title for my blog. Something clever and funny, but not cheesy. (Or perhaps so cheesy that it’s funny and clever. Time will tell.) Personally, I quite like the look of the Twenty Eleven theme, even if it does gives off a default blog vibe. So far, I haven’t found any other themes that I particularly like, but I’ll keep looking. Perhaps I’ll even spring for a premium theme at some point.

So there it is, my attempt at a first blog post.