Blog

My New Blog Needs a First Post

My first website…well sorta. About 10 years ago I built a blog using Wordpress by editing the template's CSS to meet my style preferences. I got it set up and running on a website host (before the cloud existed). I really liked making this website and writing on the blog, but I went to school full time to get my electrical engineering degree, and I just didn’t have a lot of time for the blog I had created.

Fast forwarding to present day, I’ve got my engineering degree, and I work in automotive as a system validation engineer testing embedded software. I like my job, and I like the company I work for, but since I have graduated there has always been this interest and pull to the web and software development. So here I am creating a new website and blog, only this time it’s using my Python, Flask, and AWS skills. I started out learning Python on Treehouse over a year ago, working my way through the videos and exercises. Then I started working on practice scripts, which eventually led to working with Selenium writing scripts to test website GUIs. Now, here I am with a full functional Flask website deployed in a serverless AWS instance (I never touched AWS before 2019) and parsing Markdown files for my blog.

Along the way, I learned lots, but one of the things that really resonates with me is that I really like working with code. It’s so fun, it's challenging and annoying too, but when you are able to make something or figure out an issue…it's amazing! It’s these victories that make the challenges totally worth it. Plus, I am a serial learner, and this field really satisfies my desire to keep learning cool new things, like Web Development, Test Automation, and more recently Machine Learning. Now, I am just trying to figure out how to reach my goal of working with software day in and day out, instead of primarily doing it during my free time.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions, suggestions on what I should do next, or if you might have a job opportunity available that will help me reach my goal. Mostly, I hope I can share some knowledge to help others and meet some good people along the way. After all, we are all in this together so let's support each other as much as we can.