About Dorian

So you decided to see who’s behind all of this Software Development Journey stuff huh?
Great! My name is Dorian Gosse and I’m the creator, author, and pod-caster (and I use those terms loosely) for JTSD.

Software and me

I’ve been learning to code for about 6 months at the time of this writing with an online continuing education course at my local college in their Software Development program learning business analytics, SQL fundamentals using MSSQL, Visual Basic (I know what you might be thinking and we’ll discuss that more in later posts), eventually taking Java 1 – Java 4. Previous to signing up for anything software related I had absolutely no background in tech besides playing the odd computer game and seeing “Powered by Java” pop up on the screen.

I however, grew up a tinkerer always having an interest in how things worked. Growing up I loved doing everything from helping dad build the shed, fixing the car when it broke down, and eventually when I got old enough to have a laptop and my own tech devices, fixing those. Never once though, had I ever thought what “Powered by Android” meant when I turned on my first smart phone nor what Java had to do with the latest game I was playing. I just knew it worked and I was more than content with that.

It wasn’t until a little bit later in life after having going through community college (twice), working unfulfilling dead-end jobs did I realize something needed to change or I was going to go crazy. At risk of giving you my whole life story and spoiling the opening blog post I’ll just say that I knew what I loved to do, what I wanted in a career, and happily stumbled, or rather face planted on software development and leave it at that for now.

Personal Life

I was born on July 4th 1995 not far from Toronto, Ontario. Very early on at only about 2 years old my family moved to Nova Scotia. I spent the majority of my childhood growing up there, in the beautiful Annapolis Valley where I completed grade school and part of a 2 year Survey Technician course at the local community college which I dropped out of shortly before the end of first year

After that I moved back to where my family roots were, to a small town my parents, grandparents and I call home called St.David’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. After spending a handful of years there working on one of Canada’s largest dairy farms I had saved up enough to go through another round of community college. This time at Newfoundlands community college CNA. There, I took their Mobile Crane Operators course that was about 8 months in length and had the best time in school that I’ve ever had. Unfortunately, unable to find work in Newfoundland I decided to move to where I live now. Winnipeg, Manitoba. After searching for work in my trade, I settled for a decent enough job but was, sadly, not exactly what I wanted nor in my trade. After a couple of years working as a truck driver I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So, I decided to once again, look for something to do in school. Except this time I made up my mind that this would be the last time I was ever going to go to school to kick-start a career in something that I could see myself doing for the foreseeable future. Needless to say, I had to choose wisely.

Hobbies and interests

Growing up I loved being outdoors. My all time favorite thing to do when I was small, especially when we went to visit my grandparents in Newfoundland, was fishing, taking the 4-wheeler or ski-doo for a ride and generally seeing what kind of trouble I could get in to out there. Aside from that I always LOVED my video games. If I wasn’t outside I was playing games on my computer or xbox or writing some fictional story spun up by my fascination for medieval fantasies.

Later on, I spent almost all of my free time outside of work gaming. I gamed with friends online, eventually competitively, at times winning small online tournament prizes. Blacksmithing and knife making peaked my interest about 2 years ago and I, being a tinker and builder of things, built myself a forge, an anvil, and got to work.

About the time I started taking the Software Development course I’m currently taking, I was bit by the software bug. I could not get enough information on learning how to code and everything else technology. Being a driver for a living it was not uncommon for me to be listening for 8 hours a day to how AI is going to take over the world, learning to code for beginners style podcasts, tech news, and just everything tech related. I simply could not and still cannot get enough. One thing that I never came across in all my podcast and audio book listening was a very personal in depth account of someone learning to code with zero experience. Of course there are a number of one or two episodes of a podcast that touch on the subject, but nothing under a microscope, nothing personal. Being an avid lover of literature and recently, podcasts. I set out to remedy that.