When it comes to this portfolio site and my projects, Django takes center stage. Most of my experience as an engineer is with backend technologies, so inevitably projects that I would work on were more about logic and handling data than anything else. But I wanted to make my work more accessible not just to other developers but to anyone which is where Django comes in. Django lets me manage data and computations on the back end coupled with an easy way to pass that data to the front end. The thriving community, ample support from the developers, and multitude of add-ons like Django Rest Framework and Django Taggit made it an easy choice when deciding how display my work to the public.

TailwindCSS is a major component when creating this site and my personal projects at the moment. While it's true that anything you can do with TailwindCSS can be done with vanilla CSS I find it much more efficient. Tailwind takes the concepts of reusability in code and takes it to the next level for CSS. While the HTML can look a bit messier with the CSS feels much cleaner with every used class in one file. It also means I'm less likely to fumble over naming similar classes that display very differently. Plus every Tailwind class is one-to-one with a specific style so learning Tailwind has made me more familiar with vanila CSS to the point where I'm comfortable using either.

While I've only had the chance to use Python on my personal projects it is by far my favorite language and I hope to be able to use it professionally soon. This whole site started with because I wanted to be able to easily display the directions for my Toy Brick Mosaic Maker (see below) which I had written in Python. That led me to Django as an easy way to display my work for others while also learning a new Python package which for me is one of the most enjoyable parts of Python. Beyond that I've also created tools for webcrawling, updating property files en masse and much more.

For the last 6 years of my career I have worked almost exclusively in Java, creating and maintaining the backend for Cerner's (now Oracle Health) Electronic Health Record system. I was responsible for the business logic that happened whenever a user made an API call from the front end, dealing with any data that came through and managing the database. Beyond my professional work I have been working in Java since highschool and throughout college. While ideally I would work with other technologies to continue learning new things and bettering myself, I will always be ready and willing to return to Java as I have use it more than any other language out there.

I have been using Git and Github for projects since college. I have had the pleasure to sample other repo software solutions and I can say without a doubt that Git is the best. I have used Git for most of my career and until I see a better option I hope that continues to be the case. Even now this site is managed with Git to deploy on Heroku. Check out the source code on my personal GitHub.

Most projects I've worked on involved SQL to some degree although the flavor does change. While working for Cerner we used Oracle Database and PL/SQL but in my personal projects I use SQLite before deployment and PostgreSQL for production like on this site.

Hopefully we can all agree by now that testing is important but Cucumber takes that to the next level. Instead of testing individual pieces of code Cucumber provides an intuitive framework for ensuring the behavior of a product is what we expect it to be and remains that way until the expectation changes. Working closely with designers and project managers I've been developing Cucumber tests for the last 6 years, ensuring that our acceptance criteria was fully met before merging code changes. While I don't use it for my personal projects it's difficult to imagine a product in production without some sort of acceptance test driven framework keeping the product and the developers on the same page.

I've never used HTML in my life. This site was created by sheer force of will and nothing else. Please move on.

Javascript is a mess but it also holds the internet together as we know it. Not too dissimilar from back end languages I've used Javascript less but it still feels relatively familiar and it was honestly fun finding out what I could do with it and how while creating this site.

And more! There are so many exciting technologies out there that I'd love to work with in the future when the project demamds it. If you actually read this feel free to let me know what technologies you find and who knows I might use it for my next project.