About page
Hello
I’m Blake, and I’m learning how to be a technologist. Well, a new, specific version of a technologist anyway. I’ve always been a technologist. My early tech experiences include erector sets, electronics tinkering and general analyses of systems. Later I got into computer building and repair, digital media production and tabular data models. Now I’m tackling computer programming.
I love the web and it’s ability to empower people by providing access to valuable information. With this in mind, I am focusing my studies on fullstack web development. I’m working a lot with javascript, because of it’s necessity for front end scripting, as well as it’s lightweight backend proficiency. I like to add es-next abilities to my toolkit as often as possible. Using javascript as a strongly-typed and class-based language, ie typescript / angular, is pretty neat, and because I don’t have a classical OOP background I don’t even notice any hacky bits. I’m learning that growing a high stack overflow score is seriously one of the coolest (and certainly hardest) things you can do as a programmer.
This site
This site is built with Jekyll and hosted via GitHub pages. Source files are available here. It is a work in progress. I’m planning on adding some bootstrap elements, expanding the list of links that have been helpful in my learning, integrating a standard contact form (github pages being static has me looking at POST-less API-based solutions), and some design components/techniques (like gradient borders and CSS animations). Additional near-term plans include switching the nav bar to a flexbox and going through it using more semantic html, to start getting it to a more a11y state.