Welcome to my Website!
If you're reading this, then it's working! Isn't that cool? I'm writing these words on my computer, but I'm going to send them to another computer, which is going to put them at a specific address the whole world can see, all so that you can read them on your computer. Or phone. Or whatever you've managed to get a browser to run on.
I made this website because sometimes I spend a lot of time making something that I think is pretty cool. Like this website. And I wanted other people to be able to see those things. So now I have this sort of portfolio I can show to people, and they can look at it and get a little sense of what I'm like and what I'm learning and making.
The way I made this website is a little wacky, though. I thought it would be entirely static, just pages containing sheet music, WebGL players, and text that don't really change. So I said to myself "I can totally do some string parsing and make my own static site generator with my own templates. That will totally be easier than learning to use one of the many polished products out there. I bet learning HTML and CSS will be super easy." Looking back, I have to say my reasoning was flawed, but I'm still really happy with my decision. It gave me the opportunity to get in some good practice with python and learn a lot about the guts of the internet. And it was fun! Even when all I was trying to do was center a div element. I know real web developers use all sorts of frameworks nowadays, but this is a simple static site and I wanted to do it in a way I could learn from the ground up.
Except if you look carefully it's not entirely a simple static site. The Projects page that lists all the projects is actually dynamically generated with an ajax call. So I also learned the most basic way to write a little uWSGI server in python, and how to configure an nginx server, and because that nginx server lives on my brother's computer, how to use NixOS. And that's the best part about this website: it's a project that begets other projects. Now that it's out here in the public, it makes me want to add to it, to finish up old projects and start new ones, to learn and create. Which is good, because I can need a good kick in the butt to get working on things. I hope this website actually provides that kick, and I hope you enjoy.