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Joe Bowser
Joe Bowser

Hello, Again

I haven't maintained a blog in years, and in fact I don't think most people have. I switched back to Wordpress a few years ago, but that never stuck, and I feel the need to re-start the blog from the beginning, so here it is.

Who I am

I'm Joe Bowser, I've done many things, but I'm most well known for being a Software Developer who co-created PhoneGap and Apache Cordova, a framework for making Mobile Applications using HTML, CSS and Javascript. I'm also known for the following things:

  • Working on OnDevice Machine Learning Features and doing presentations at conferences
  • Being spied on by the RCMP for five years due to the 2010 Olympics and me being against them
  • Co-Founding a Campus-Based Community Radio Station in Prince George
  • Co-Founding the Vancouver Hack Space and disavowing it once they decided to add cameras
  • Doing a Community WiFi thing and deciding that it actually needs to come from the communities it serves
  • Putting on a Live Hip-Hop concert in Surrey despite not knowing anything about HipHop or the Vancouver Hip Hop scene in the late 2000s, or even being from Vancouver
  • Owning a Rivian R1T and posting a ton of pictures of it on Instagram

And now I'm going to be starting on my next big adventure, which is hiking 2650 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. I'm leaving my job of seventeen years (some would argue the job left me), leaving my family for five whole months, leaving the whole GenAI hype and tech in general behind.

WHY?

In short, I'm burned out and the job market sucks. Throughout my career, but especially over the past five years, there's been a constant battle between my health and my career, and due to external factors, the career always won. However, financially and due to circumstances beyond my control, I am now in a situation where I have the opportunity to put my career on a temporary pause and pursue a long time goal of thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

OK, But why the PCT?

  • The trail is there
  • I'm probably never going to be unemployed for a long time after this stint of unemployment. The last time I was unemployed was 2007.
  • I need to lose weight, and I can't afford Ozempic
  • It looks better on LinkedIn than "I just sat around at home playing Baldurs Gate 3"

OK, you're going to do the trail and then what?

I don't know yet. I might do a startup? I might just get a new job? I might just sell my house give up on tech and the lower mainland and move somewhere cheaper and get a non-tech job that covers my expenses. That's the cool thing about the future, it's unwritten.

Your blog is kinda ugly now

Yeah, to be honest, I kinda rushed this because I've spent more time doing a shakedown and figuring out my hiking and personal situation than getting this together. Also, I'm kinda new to Next, and while it's easy to get a template up, I ran into issues with Mapbox integration and I actually find it harder to use this framework than just writing Vanilla JS. However, hobby projects are how you learn things, so here we are.