A Brief History
I first learned what html was while browsing the profiles of friends on AOL Instant Messenger. My first website was appropriately horrendous for a teenager at the end of the '90s, complete with an auto-play music file on repeat. I wish I had a record of it. The internet has come a long way since then.
I spent the next several years haphazardly flirting with coding, picking up bits and pieces here and there. Working in broadcast design repeatedly pushed me in that direction. I used Visual Basic to create macros to automate processes in Chyron Lyric. I used javascript to create expressions in After Effects, calculating equations to make dynamic link templates responsive to text entered via Premiere -- or to create limits on sliders to define the range of motion on character rigs. (If that sounded like Greek to you, your take-away is that coding can do some amazing things in some unexpected places, and that makes me absurdly happy.) I also continued to experiment with my own websites in my spare time.
Eventually I decided that actually pursuing this coding thing might be a good idea. I looked into Coding Bootcamps but the pricetag seemed insurmountable. In the short term I decided to start taking courses on LinkedIn Learning. It helped fill in a few holes and I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the content was simply a refresher for me. This site is my first since getting up-to-speed -- a baseline for my skills and expertise moving forward. It can only get better from here.
Creating This Site
I built this site from scratch. I started with a mock-up in Sketch, set up the basic code in Brackets, and tested the framework with BrowserSync. I scoured the net for inspiration, looking for the smartest, most interesting nuggets to pull inspiration from. You can judge the result for yourself.
Fun Fact: The body background-color of this site is based on the paint color in my study (aka: my work space).