I've been meaning to catch up on many long lost years of the developments in web technologies. This paired with the fact that I need a space to flush my digital life to was the impetus and my looming job search spurred me to make a new website. I finally have found some time to create a new personal website. My old one has served its purpose and is starting to get antiquated, especially since I never update it (it's not that fun to update mainly due it being built with a ten year old version of DreamWeaver).

I started learning about website creation in my high school years (1995-2000) with the likes of Geocities and Fortunecity and Netscape Navigator. My first website was called the "The Jive" (after seeing the words on a cool sweatshirt this black guy with the Kid, of Kid and Play, style flattop haircut. It was a four color rainbow with Jive written over it in white). I primarily used the website to post information about all the cartoons I watched as a child in the 80's (Transformers, Bravestar, Thundercats, He-Man, etc). I blatantly posted tons of copyrighted material from VHS tapes I had recorded of the shows. But The Jive taught me about HTML and was certainly the first seed for any interests in programming that I would have years later.

I used these skills to create several websites over the years following high school, but getting a Bachelors and Masters in mechanical engineering left me no time to keep up with the rapid pace the web was developing at. By the time I looked at websites again, everything had become a completely different and extremely more complex world.

I finally got around to fiddling with modern websites about four years ago when I started learning about various content management systems and website generators such as Plone, Joomla, Wordpress, Blogger, etc. I learned to get these up and running to use them but still had little idea of what made them tick.

My programming chops started to grow once my labmate, Luke, convinced me to move beyond Matlab and test the waters with Python about 3 years ago. Since then I've slowly picked up more and more about what the modern web is all about but still haven't had much time to try creating something of any complexity.

This new personal site is my first step with getting to grips with at least the front end side of modern web development. I'm using the static site generator, Hyde, to create the site and paring it with Twitter's popular boostrap framework (forgive me for having another boostrap looking website, once I figure out my design a bit I'll try to move away from the standard look). The source is versioned with Git and the source is hosted on Github under a BSD style license. I'm going with a general public domain license for the content, so have at it.