About Me

I'm Jed Saxon, if you couldn't tell by the URL of this site. I'm a software developer based in Victoria, Australia currently finishing off my (boring) Computer Science degree at Swinburne University.

A am a metalhead, and love anything from Sonata Arctica's cheesy power metal, to Lamb of God's heaviest tracks.

I have strong opinions against social media , large language models , and generally maintain a minimal lifestyle. I have a very barebones Neovim config and am still rocking the default colour scheme. My DWM setup is equally minimal, only having yellow window borders so I don't get lost.

The Timeline

2019

May

First Started Programming

My first experience programming was when I wanted to make a game. So naturally, I searched up "how to make a game" and watched that one Unity tutorial everyone also watched, from Brackeys. Yes, that one ...

  • C#

  • Unity

2021

Improving Unity and C# Skills

I never really understood the C# code I was writing, nor did I really know what game to make. Because I enjoyed the process of developing "cool things", I kept making new projects and developing random game mechanics.

  • C#

  • Unity

2022

April

First Linux Install

During high school, I had a very underpowered HP laptop. This laptop barely ran Windows 10, and so it was right of passage to install Linux. And while my Linux Mint experience was fantastic at home, I was unable to get it connected to my school's network, and couldn't really use it.

  • Linux

June

Started Certificate IV of IT at Chisholm

High school wasn't challenging me enough, so I came to the decision to continue my studies in TAFE as opposed to completing VCE.

  • Java

  • Swing

  • Python

  • MySQL

December

Began Daily Driving Fedora Linux

And finally, now that Windows serves no purpose other than to get in my way, I decided to get rid of the curse. Nvidia drivers were good enough , The Microsoft Office suit was no longer necessary, and I had time to learn Linux fully. So, I decided to completely switch to it.

If you are interested, I used Gnome as my desktop environment and actually liked it.

  • Linux

  • Fedora

2023

Janurary

Freelancing - E.Team Codes

Developed and maintained a simple application to view comics when given a 6-digit code. It uses an ASP.NET backend, Razor frontend, MySQL database, and comes with a handy deployment docker-compose.yaml script. The client could create, and manage their comics using the Entity Framework identity system.

  • C#

  • MySQL

  • Docker

  • HTML/CSS/JS

  • jQuery

  • ASP.NET Core

Feburary

Started Diploma of IT at Swinburne University

After finishing the Certificate IV of IT, I had to make the decision on where to continue my studies. I landed on Swinburne, as their Diploma of IT (advanced programming) seemed like the logical next step.

It was a 1 year course that would get me into University with interesting projects to work on (as opposed to just theory).

  • C#

  • PHP

  • C++

  • AWS

  • Docker

  • MySQL

May

First Commit on jedsaxon/portfolio

This is the longest amount of time I've worked on a project. I've kept this same repository from the very beginning and have kept adding stuff, improving old stuff, and just... uhh.. doing other random stuff to this site.

I remember the days when this site used to use Bootstrap, with some extra colours. Glad that I switched to using my own CSS.

  • HTML/CSS/JS

July

Switched to Arch Linux

I became very curious about Arch Linux during this time. Fedora was good, but the idea of installing a Linux distribution from the ground up excited me for some reason. So, I switched to it. This was the beginning of my CLI-only workflow.

I also switched to just using XFCE4 in this time. The simplistic user interface is incredible to use, even though it looks "old".

  • Linux

  • Arch Linux

2023

Feburary

Started Bachelor of Computer Science at Swinburne University

Now begins the hell that I had been dreading since high school. Just 2 more years to go!

August

Switched to Neovim and vim motions

It was time to become a real man. No more stupid overblown sub-menus, slow browser-based text editors, and moving my hand off the keyboard to use mouse and click on the "commit" button.

Time for Neovim, where I have learnt to do everything with just the home row and manually configuring LSPs. My config might suck, but its mine, and it kinda works for me.

  • Vim

  • Neovim

2025

Janurary

DWM for life

As much as XFCE4 felt like the final desktop environment with its simplistic user interface, and the fact it did everything it needed to - display a couple of windows... those "couple of windows" kept growing...

Suckless's DWM (dynamic window manager) is the logical extensition of XFCE4, being a simple window manager with no extra animations or blur effects. Every window is managed via the keyboard instead of the mouse.

I cannot use Windows or macOS anymore... why do people put up with alt-tab when you could just press alt-1 or alt-2 and be done with it?

Feburary - June

Assignment after assignment after assignment

For anyone going to Swinburne, do NOT... and I mean do NOT do 4 units every semester. Please... just don't.

Especially if you decide to do 3 web-development related units, and 1 data structures unit requiring hand-written C++. Seriously?? Handwriting C++ ?? Give us some mercy and let us do it in Python at least!

Now

The Future

The Future

Its really a matter of completing the Bachelor of Computer Science at this stage. Once thats done? Well, its time to get employed.

Before that, I hope that maybe I'll have time to get into Linux kernel or FreeBSD development, just for fun. Perhaps create some hardware mods for my Framework laptop. Who knows.

For all I know, I could just decide screw it, and spend the rest of my life taking pictures of trains just because I can.