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This was my first attempt at creating a website. I chose to use pure CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to
build a foundational understanding of basic web development concepts. I opted to use GitHub Pages
because it bundles version control with free and reliable hosting. I discovered GitHub Pages while building
an automated test result reporting system at John Deere.
This project was made for a couple reasons: I wanted to learn more about front-end development and I thought a
personal website would better illustrate who I am than a traditional resume or CV would for graduate school applications.
The idea of creating a website came to me while reviewing professors I'd be interested in studying under. They
made me realize how helpful a personal site can be.
There are a few things I've already come to love about front-end development: JavaScript and its control are a lot of fun, CSS has an absurd number of
properties that I have spent hours playing with, and I've had a blast using my browser's dev tools to see how other websites do things.
However, there has been one thing that has ate at me throughout development and that's not being able to do client-side includes. I played around with
using JavaScript's fetch() function to do so, but testing without pushing to GitHub caused my browser to get upset and throw errors because of security restrictions,
so I've avoided it. I also considered using Python to generate the HTML files, but the development time would far exceed any manual copy and pasting I have to do (for now, at least).
I would like to revisit these concepts in the future.
Overall, I've really enjoyed making this site. I'm glad I have an accessible, less formal place (compared to a CV) to showcase what I've accomplished over the last
4 years. While I want to continue iterating and improving the code, I'm pretty excited to take a break
and dive into a book I recently picked up, JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. I'm sure I'll look back at this and laugh as everything I've done here is slowly
torn apart by what I learn from the book.