Welcome to Antares Programming Blog

Finally! The Antares Programming Blog is online! The blog has so many things in store for you, so check it out!

Antares Programming started out as a venture by me, Francis Rubio, with the goal of making money from developing applications for students who have so many things on their plate that they can’t possibly create one or two of their capstones or theses at the same time. Being a student myself, I know how that feels and I needed the money. So I created the Antares Facebook page.

But since then, Antares has taken a different direction. Surprisingly, within months’ time, it became a window where I can share things that I have learned and are currently learning to my Facebook friends. I had wanted to do something like this for a long time, but I had always thought no one would read them, or no one would care. And the most extreme was that I thought that the people who read would assume that I am being a smartass or a know-it-all.

However, the Antares page gained traction after my friends—my dearest and closest friends—have promoted it ever so devotedly. It reached even those far away friends-of-friends. This gave me a confidence boost; I thought “Maybe I should try doing this.” So I posted the first series of infographics (which will also be available here some time soon), which exploded because people actually liked it.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those people who promoted that page. Or probably one of the first ones to like that page. You’re one of the reasons of this success. So to give back to you, I am committing myself to creating more content. Learning never stops, they say. And I believe that we all should learn together. Plus, having an active blog would benefit my résumé.

What should I expect from the Antares Programming blog?

The first content I put out in the Facebook page was a set of text-heavy infographics. And that was an attempt to give big information in bite-sized chunks. Obviously, that is an effort in vain. We can’t really learn that much from very small chunks; we have to take in big pieces of information in order to be better.

The opposite is the kind of content I am planning to see in the Antares Blog. Emphasis on planning. It’s too early to say anything about the exact path I am taking with this blog. But I am planning on giving more detailed pieces about programming in general, coding styles, etc.

Of course, that is with the disclaimer that I am not an authority. But for the most part I believe I have enough knowledge to share, and as far as I can, I will include the original sources of information.

Within what bounds of topics will this blog write about?

Well, we start with the core—programming concepts. Like explanations of stuff like abstraction, object-oriented programming, polymorphism, functional programming, and the likes. I also like to explore the different best practices, coding style, and other things like that.

I also want to talk about design. Being a budding UX designer myself, I am passionate about making things decent enough to look at, and many would benefit from this because a lot of times, when you are a hardcore programmer, you tend to neglect the front-facing part of your system. So I want to touch that, too.

I also want to talk about tools, like my personal favorite VS Code (which is surprisingly not gaining traction here in the Philippines in spite of being much more superior than its leading competitor Sublime Text), open source software that I use that have made my life easier, like the (as of the time of writing) free Gravit Designer, and others that I think would fit the general theme of the blog.

Will there be memes?

Ha-ha! No.

The Antares Programming Facebook page posts in Filipino. Would you do that here too?

Of course. My target demographic are the Filipinos; this blog is for them. So I want to use the language they understand. That said, I wouldn’t want to neglect people from other parts of the world that could benefit from here.

One thing I have been thinking about was to have the articles first written in Filipino and then translated to English. While this is a great prospect, I don’t have much time on my hands, so maybe we’ll see in the future.

Seriously, no memes?

Yeah. No memes.

How can I help?

If you are reading this, you are interested in helping me, and for just that I want to thank you very much! The best way to help is to spread the word! Tell your friends about this blog and the Facebook page. I would really appreciate that.

You can also recommend books and articles that I can read, so we gain a bigger knowledgebase for better articles.

And if you want to help me write articles, you are very welcome, kind person! I am open-sourcing this blog’s code base, so just send me a pull request on Github. The instructions on how to do this will be there so be sure to look at that.

A word about memes

Okay, I am a fun person, everyone knows that. But for me, memes about programming are detestable. I mean that in the sense that there’s very few topics in the computer world that are actually memeable. That results in the same joke being repeated over and over again but only using different meme formats. An example of this is the semi-colon joke. Seriously, we have smart IDE’s and linters now. The old days are gone, it’s so much easier to hunt down those pesky missing semi-colons. And that joke, I think, died a long time ago.

Of course, defending myself, this doesn’t mean I don’t want to have fun. You’ll find that I write humor into my articles. It’s just that I am getting tired of the same thing over and over again. Plus there’s already a lot of platforms out there (Facebook alone has too many pages to count) that serve these memes. This blog is not for that, I’m sorry to tell you.

What about those infographics? Will you still do them?

Of course. I am a visual learner so I really value a delicious graphic to complement my learning. The articles I am going to write will include several diagrams if appropriate, and I would try to make them as decent and accurate as possible. And I will continue making infographics on Facebook. Some time soon, I would also include them here.

Still reading? Okay thanks! I want to thank you for taking this journey with me. I promise to give you the best articles I could write so we can all learn together. Thank you, and see you on the next article.