And why “home” may not mean what you think it means
Along with “How many languages do you speak?” and “What do your parents do?”, the question “Where are you from?” ranks high on the list of inquiries any Third Culture Kid gets asked the most during their childhood, by other kids and adults alike.
Although the question usually comes from a place of well intended curiosity, it has become increasingly difficult for me to answer it. Through this brief essay, I’d like to understand why we ask this question, what is the intent behind it, and why answering it may not be so straightforward.
With borders more open than ever…
And why providing a phonetic transcription of it is a bad idea
Recently, I’ve started noticing some strange square brackets containing cryptic, dash-separated syllables popping next to people’s names on Slack. I soon understood these to be the arbitrary phonetic transcriptions of these people’s names.
To make sure we’re on the same page, if I were to mimic this alien cipher with my own name, my display name would then look something along the lines of:
Jonathan [john-uh-thun]
Now, although I cannot be entirely certain, I will suppose that those who have chosen to proactively add this bracketed information to…
How to scale your customer support operations.
A few years ago I worked a customer/technical /community (pick one) support role. Although it was interesting, fun and challenging at first, the whole thing soon became fairly repetitive and tedious. This was in a tech company and with all this talk of scripting, algorithms and machine learning floating around, I thought:
“Why can’t my job also be automated?”
Good news is: it can! Well, to some extent… If the processes in place and management allow for it… If you have the skills and capacity, i.e. time & energy™ to set it up and be willing to maintain it.
Let’s…
From tech support to engineering in under 2 years.
First things first, unless you’ve stalked me on LinkedIn, you might think that I’ve been a developer for years, that I programmed adventure games on floppy disks as a preteen, that I have seen countless JavaScript frameworks rise to GitHub stardom and then slowly fall into the abyss of forgotten repos, that “back in my days, CSS didn’t exist yet”. Truth is I started learning code after Flexbox came along… Punchline is, I’m still very new to code.
Despite my airquotes rookieness /airquotes, I’d still like to share my story given how (unnecessarily) difficult and confusing my first steps down…
Conquering tinnitus and a burnout
Living with tinnitus
I was only a kid when I was struck with tinnitus — that ringing in your ears you get after going to a loud concert without wearing earplugs (please protect your ears!). Except it never went away. Today, some 17 years later, I would like to tell my story and share some tips about coping with what can sometimes feel like the most alienating, frustrating and physically exhausting symptom. With this, I hope to raise awareness around this little known/understood disorder and educate those who do not suffer from it to better understand those who do. …
Jonathan Andreo
Studied sound but now in software. I love music, food, traveling and video games. I know Kung Fu.
