Megan Jones |ˈmɛɡən ˈdʒəʊnz |

Background

I've been a software engineering consultant since 2020, building custom Salesforce applications for enterprise clients. My route here involved two literature degrees, seven years teaching English as a foreign language, a graduate teaching assistantship, a coding bootcamp, managing two 2018 political campaigns, some intense citizen lobbying, and the gradual realization that I wanted to build things instead of just talking about them. I've also worked in food service, retail, and was in the control group for a lot of studies at Indiana University - basically I've gone wherever curiosity, chance and the need to pay my bills led me, and I've found my home in software development.

Natural Languages

Languages have been a fascination of mine since childhood. My mother likes to tell the story of how in kindergarten I demanded she explain how to spell the letter A because knowing how to write it wasn't good enough for me. By elementary school, I was picking up words in other languages to talk to my classmates. Eventually, this interest led me to comparative literature and teaching English, then to computer programming - which isn't as different as people think. These are the languages that I'm currently learning and maintaining:

• Spanish - B2/C1
  • started in high school, became my brain's backup operating system
• French - B2
  • pandemic hobby turned unexpected obsession
• Italian - B1/B2
  • Sacco and Vanzetti made me do it
• Indonesian - B1
  • Indonesian neighbors turned tidak into belum and eventually ya
• Portuguese - B1
  • started for the salary boost, stayed for the samba
• Russian - A2/B1
  • began on a whim, accidentally committed

Programming Languages

Because of my background in learning human languages, I've found that programming languages have a lot of the grammar, syntax and logic patterns of natural languages, but without the complications of culture, vocabulary and exceptions, making them easier to learn but still lots of fun. These are the programming languages I've spent the most time in:

• JavaScript
  • my first programming language that I still use all the time
• Apex
  • Salesforce's proprietary version of Java I use every day at work
• Python
  • the language I wish I got to use for everything that thankfully is common for natural language processing purposes
• Java
  • what I used for most of my computer science degree assignments