December 7, 2016

What this site is about

This site is about ME, of course! I have not had an active web site of my own for some time. This one is partly intended to show programming skills and develop new ones, partly intended as a hobby site to discuss the many interests I have. Since I'm currently looking for a new gig, initially I'll be working up some programming demos. For most of my career, I've been primarily a back-end LAMP developer applying business rules to various kinds of data and serving it up as web pages. I've written a whole lot of PERL and a fair amount of PHP. I delved into Drupal a bit which seems a bit top heavy to me but has a a solid open source community behind it and allows rapid development of managed content web sites. On my last job, I got to learn about XSLT which I like for the ease of transforming data into styled HTML pages.

Beside showing the implementation of various web technologies, the intent of this site is present and discuss other interests. Some of the things I've been into recently are woodworking, learning weaving on a rigid heddle loom, discovering yarn and learning how to make epsom salt/menthol lotion. I discovered power tools a couple years ago and fell in love which led me to woodworking. I started with the idea of making stick shuttles for my rigid heddle loom, acquired a shop full of tools and still haven't made those stick shuttles. It's been a whole lot of fun picking up the skills and along the way I became something of an avid DYIer. Tremendously overdoing it with a random orbital sander made me think an epsom salt/menthol rub would be a great idea. It turns out it's harder than it sounds because you have to create an emulsion and I have yet to find a great recipe which doesn't involve chemicals I would rather not use. Last, but far from least, is my love of furry creatures. I expect some of my houseful of dogs and cats will be making appearances here.

Expect lots of changes and new demos and content in the days ahead!

-- Laura