About Me
Hello, My name is Jonathon Owens. I am a self taught programmer and musician, and avid gamer. I started learning C# when I was 13 (from a guy I met on runescape) because it seemed cool too me and I never really expected to be here 14 years later. I’ve honestly struggled with feeling validated as a programmer, as I have no real professional experience and my biggest project is a minecraft overhaul mod which I’ve put several years into; So it’s absolutely amazing to have my talents acknowledged here.
When I first saw Thrive I was like wow, this is good, it’s like spore for grown ups, and when I found out it was open source I knew I wanted to get involved but it wasn’t until my friend who introduced me to Thrive; Who subsequently got a degree in programming told me to no sell myself short as a programmer. So here I am, and I hope I can be of help.
Skills
Programmer/Game Logic - My main focus will probably on code as I feel it’s most needed right now. I have a strong grasp on game logic, efficient code.
Musician - I’ve been playing guitar for about as long as I’ve been coding, however; I can be considered a professional here as I have been employed by Guitar Center as an instructor. I also can play bass, drums, piano, and flute. I also have pretty good recording equipment as well. My Soundcloud - These are a bit older, I have newer equipment now, but these are my original works.
Tester - I play alot of games, and I also regularly debug my mod project so I know what to look for in game testing. Once I get more familiar with the code base I feel like I will also be able to help out by finding bugs and pointing to the appropriate place in code or just outright submitting a PR to fix it.
Wrapping Up
That’s about it for my tangent of an introduction. I’m happy to be here, and look forward to helping this game grow!
Honestly C# and Java are so similar I practically have them in the place in my brain with their differences in a separate spot. I do find myself going for(type var : list) a lot though and going oh right… C# uses “in”
Honestly I mostly made windows forms applications for fun. Most of my experience is in Java, but I’ve just always had a knack for C# since they are similar. I recently started messing with it again and made a simple TCP network library just to see if I could.
Ah it’s starting to come back to me, I made an old game similar to 1945 back in XNA game studio, and I remade it in Unity at one point years later.
Welcome to the team. A bit late, but I wasn’t feeling pressured to reply as you got other replies, which is pretty rare…
Anyway seeing as you already got started with the programming changes. I’ll instead suggest that you could also get into reviewing PRs (as we are often pretty short on people available to review other’s work to make sure it is good quality). And on the testing front I’d like to see testing on this major editor MP rework:
(I’m hoping to dedicate time soon to do a full code review on that PR to get it in time for the next release)
Also, I’ve done minecraft mods in the past, well actually I made a few bukkit server plugins that I ran on my minecraft server that I had for a few years. Though, I didn’t get started with Java, I started with C++. Perhaps that’s the reason I actually kinda dislike Java, it feels pretty patronizing in comparison. C# is much nicer in having a lot of powerful syntax features that Java philosophy seems to be against as they don’t want to actually trust programmers to be competent.
