Hello steemit

Hello fellow steemit users.

Who am I?

My nickname is jalayn, or jala for short, and I am happy to have been accepted into the community a few days back now. I am a software developer currently living in Canada, in the Québec province. I am what is nowadays called a full-stack dev, although I know I have more affinity towards backend programming.
My primary language is French, but I also perfectly understand and speak English and Polish, and I have very distant fading memories of speaking German. On the same subject, I also started a personal challenge more than a year ago: learn Japanese (more on that later)

Not social ?

I have no facebook, and the only social networks I'm signed in are linkedin, purely for professional reasons, and instagram which I like to use as a personal photo journal of my travels, much less as a social network. Does it look like I am not very social? No, I'm not. At least, not very much outside of my family and friends circle.
But with the advent of the blockchain technology and decentralized democracy-centered apps, I very much feel like there is some space left for healthy social networks and apps driven both by amateur and professional quality content.
It feels to me we are at a crossroad and that it's up to us, the human race as a whole, to improve everyone's life using modern tools and approaches (like https://www.democracy.earth/ for example). Seems to me we can do better now than just being good at targeting people though ads ;-)

So, I've been lurking around for some time, and managed to stumble upon some great articles and pieces of writing here. I would like to be more active and attempt to provide some interesting material too.

What are my interests, and what can we exchange on?

In no particular order, and not limited to these, I would be thrilled to share and exchange on the following subjects:

• Learning Japanese (and the culture): in terms of freely available information, we're leaving in beautiful times. You can learn yourself pretty much anything given time. However, learning Japanese is indeed very hard. Imagine yourself having to remember not one but 3 alphabets and then 2000+ kanjis. I've used a combination of online resources and I can share what worked and still works for me. I am far from being able to sustain a basic conversation yet, but I now know 400+ kanjis and found myself recognizing some or even understanding parts of sentences (like the title in https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@westjapandaily/japanese-newspaper-joined-steemit in fact)
• Clean code and pragmatic programming: DRY, YAGNI, SOLID, TDD, etc. All the usual acronyms. I've been very clean-code religious for some time but dialed back a few notches to a more balanced clean but pragmatic approach. I did my share of training and slideshow presentations and I can definitely say this is one of my strongest area of knowledge.
• Frameworks and programming patterns: I mostly dabble in Java, JavaScript nowadays and I have a few years of Java/Spring under the belt. Been recently working with Golang which I found quite nice.
• Gamification: the process of adding gameplay elements to an activity that is devoid of it at first sight. I finished the excellent Coursera course on this subject (https://www.coursera.org/learn/gamification) and loved it: Kevin Werbach is really a good teacher.
• Books: very science-fiction oriented and even more as time goes by, but I also read my share of fantasy books. I am desperately trying to put a dent in the list of Hugo/Nebula/Locust awarded books, and my most recent read was in fact the quite excellent Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (who is becoming one of my favorite authors the more I read from him).
  As a side note, I've lately become quite appreciative of audiobooks. Far from the point of throwing away by beloved Kindle Aura HD, but listening to a story delivered by a talented actor is quite an experience.

So, thanks for reading this small introduction to my world and please drop me a note if you'd like me to share more of my experience. I will be very happy to put my modest writing skills to use and attempt to contribute to the quality content found here.

I very humbly salute you fellow steemit users!

ps: please note that I am not affiliated whatsoever to any online education company or website (that I've linked to here or not). I am just a regular user, and as a software developer by trade, I am more inclined to recognize well-designed components/apps ; but that's it.