About Me
I am an aspiring IT Technician, programmer, and musician currently living and working in Durham, NC. I currently work in disability services at UNC Chapel Hill TEACCH Employment Services. In this job, I provide on site support to adult clients with Autism or intellectual disabilities, as well as providing on-site training and vocational skills for high school students with disabilities.
I am passionate about computers and technology, and I am finally taking the plunge of pursuing a career working with computers. I am self-driven and always eager to learn new skills. Rather than making a website with SquareSpace, I'm coding it myself! Rather than paying someone to host the site, I'm hosting it myself! It's more challenging, but it's also more rewarding to learn the technology involved and develop new skills along the way.
Prior to my current role, I worked as a musician and public school music teacher. I play the violin, viola, and guitar, and I occasionally offer private lessons. Past performances are available on YouTube.
In addition to looking for work, I'm seeking opportunities to volunteer with local non-profits to provide IT Support services. If interested, feel free to reach out by email.
About This Site
Why write the code yourself?
A few simple reasons. It's substantially cheaper (free!) than using a service. It's a chance to use my programming skills and learn more about frontend design. It keeps me from being reliant on anyone or any service except myself. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I enjoy it!
Why Golang?
Go or Golang is a bit of a hot up-and-coming programming language. It's very straightforward to learn and use, and is generally considered to be very performant. Go is often used for microservices and webapps and comes with builtin features that make building webapps easy and fun. This whole site has no external dependencies, which would be quite a feat in another programming language. Moreover, robust frameworks like Django or Flask for Python, Ruby on Rails, Java Springboot, etc. would be overkill. Similarly, React would be overkill for the frontend.
Why host this site locally?
To learn! It's fairly straightforward to host a website or webapp through a third party service, but I wanted to know more about the process. I have a Homelab already running, so it only made sense to give it a shot! I do rely on Cloudflare for my DNS records and security, but the website itself is running on my home server in my living room (so don't be surprised if there is downtime).