About Me

I am a Program Coordinator at the Kramden Institute in Durham, NC. My initial career path was in music and music education, and I have also worked in disability services at UNC TEACCH Employment Services. This site is a place for me to share writings, thoughts, personal projects, and whatever else comes to mind. As a hobbyist programmer, I love checking out different programming languages and frameworks. Occasionally, I put together a relatively complete project that shows up here on the site.

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).