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.
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 host it yourself?
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).
Why Python and Django?
I first looked at Django a couple of years ago and found it overwhelming. You start up a new project and suddenly you're staring at tons of files. A "Micro-Framework" like Flask seemed a better fit for me and the small projects I was working on. As I've gotten more familiar with Python and programming in general, I decided I should take another crack at Django. This time around, I've found that it's not as overwhelming as previously thought. All that apparent complexity also means that I don't have to build features from the ground up or use third party libraries (other than Django itself, of course).