Hello, Internet!

Well, this is the first blog post on my redesigned site. My goal is just to have a spot for my random musings, technical discoveries, outputs from my brain in fairly raw form, or whatever else I want it to be because it is mine. I think another reason I wanted this is to have a spot I can point to in the future (who knows how far in the future) to say - ah ha!, my prediction was right! I’ll definitely share this with friends and family, but to the random stranger who stumbles across these words, human or not, thanks for stopping by and I hope something in these pages made you smile and/or think - if it did, then my site served its’ purpose.

Why ‘Hello, Internet!’

If you have spent any time ever building something on a computer, there is the concept of a Hello, World! - I’m sure you have heard the stories, seen the collection of 450 different ways to code it (http://helloworldcollection.de/) my personal favs would be the z80 console where you set pixels. But, in my wondering “is it too cliche to start a blog with a hello, world post - I found out that yeah, it is the most common first post on a blog because it was the default post on WordPress. Since 2003, every WordPress started with a “Hello world! Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!” So many people never got beyond that or forget their login credentials, or just left it to be cute - thus it is decidedly way too hackneyed to be used. So I made it my own, “Hello, Internet!”

My Hello worlds! over the years - my goodness, so many to think about. I made my first website when I was 14 years old. We had a computer with specs that resembled something like 75mhz, 2gb HD, no idea the RAM - it was barely able to run AOL. After years of begging, I remember we upgraded to a Gateway computer, pentium IV 1.3 GHZ, a graphics card so I could pay video games, and a 40gb harddrive - WOW, now we are talking!

Who’s dog?

The picture at the top of this post is actually the oldest capture of my first site from WaybackMachine - Feb 13th, 2003! That’s my friend’s dog, I unfortunately don’t remember his name.

From then to now

My first website was hand written HTML, I think in notepad, FTP’d up to a server a friend had, and most likely a domain name purchased on goDaddy My dad thought his Credit Card would get stolen if we used it online, I think I might have paid for that first domain name w/ a gift card. Ahhh, but over the years, I self-learned HTML & Javascript, in HS, I took two years of CS they taught us the basics (for loops, bubble sort, parameter scope) and Java. I made the “Varsity” CS team as a junior and went to an international CS competition in New Jersey that spring. We placed fourth because one of our programs didn’t wrap their code in a try/catch so when the first input was some weird negative number or character, it crashed and we lost the 20 points on that part of the project. After the competition was over, we set up a LAN between the hotel rooms and played Starcraft and no one cared we lost. Unfortunately, the competition fell on prom weekend our senior year, so most of the seniors decided not to go and it kind of fell apart after that (Sorry Mr. Halbert). At UT, I studied MIS and learned SQL, .ASP NET, Microsoft server management - wow, this microsoft stuff is great. Then I got an internship at Google and I realized UT was a Microsoft shop and we were missing out on all the joys of PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc. When I returned to campus for my Junior year, I became a TA and pushed for open source software and taught it in my lab!

I’ll save the details for another post, but LAMP was a core part of my soul for ~15 years. I’ve recently switched to Dockerized Django and python and would like to pick up rust at some point in the future. But really, are we not just all learning how to work with LLMs. I built this site on astro deployed to cloudflare - just something new I wanted to try and seemed simple enough.

All that is to say, I’ve had a really fun time just thinking back on my history with computers and code to write this opening post, I can’t wait to see what pops up next.

I plan to write about:

• Coding: Trials, tribulations, mistakes, learnings, and fun things
• Projects: Updates on various things I am tinkering with
• Life: Being a husband, a dad, a friend, a brother, a son, a human, a being on this wonderful blue dot

later later
km