As a treat for reading this far, here is a picture of my dogs!
After spending the last week or so messing with different things, I've finally landed on a layout for this page that I am happy enough with to share with my pals on Twitter. Is it perfect? No! However, I didn't want to let perfect be the enemy of good, and rather than trying to mess with this more and more, I am going to just be happy for now and work on updating and getting more fancy later. Also, if you want to skip the post and check out the dog pictures, here you go!
There are a number of things that I've learned from making this website. You probably won't be surprised to read that the first iterations of this page were just black text on white background. I wanted to go for something a bit more visually appealing, but I didn't want to sacrafice accessibility. One of my biggest challenges was getting the navigation bar set up right.
I wanted to break out and specifically talk about all the things that I learned in the process of setting up that navigation bar. First, I learned that the order of where you put things is really important. I thought it made sense to put the navigation bar in the head section of the page. What that actually did was put everything out of view of the browser. Once I realized that I needed to put the nav bar under the body section of the page, I was able to get the look I was after.
That wasn't the last of my troubles though. Once I got one page where the nav bar layout was working right, I wasn't able to get it right on all the other pages. Visiting either the contact or about pages had the broken nav bar and even though I had changed the code to look exactly like thte pages that were properly loading, it still wasn't working right. I paused to think about it, and realized that I was probably looking at a cached version of the website. Once I hit refresh, I was able to see the updates taking place. I'm embarassed to admit that I might have previously just physically walked away from my computer to come back and check the changes later. So that makes two valuable lessons learned!
Next challenge was adding pictures. This wasn't too tough at first, because it's just a single command. However, the image loaded way too big, so a little digging was required to learn that you can set the dimensions of an image within the tag. I had learned this when first going through the FreeCodeCamp Frontend Developer course - which was the place that helped me get going with HTML and CSS again. I have a copy of this book sitting next to me right now, it's called HTML & CSS - design and build websites by Jon Duckett. I read through it years ago, but it is difficult for me to learn computer stuff just from a book. FreeCodeCamp is excellent because it has the lesson and the exercise right on the same screen. You don't have to waste any time setting up a development environment, you just follow along and add your code and can see the results right in the same browser window.
As a treat for reading this far, here is a picture of my dogs!
Those are the big three things that I learned when building out this website. Nav bar and making sure that I refresh the page instead of waiting for the internet to do it for me. Now that I've got this page to a place where I am happy, I'm going to shift over to doing some different programming tasks. I am leaning towards python and maybe Django or Flask for some backend web dev stuff. But I have a copy of Expert C Programming - Deep C Secrets written by Peter van der Linden. Last time I tried to mess with this book, I didn't have enough comfort with C to keep going. I've not messed with C very much since then, so I suspect that isn't going to be very successful for me. However, I think I am going to give it a try.
For some of the stuff I am most interested in lately, particularly having to do with container security, it would be helpful to be more comfortable reading C. Given that the Linux kernel is written in C, and it is a very powerful and dangerous language, I think it would be really fun to learn. In the past, however, I have had more success with python than any other language. So if I am not making decent progress by the end of this week on C, I am going to probably look at either dividing my time, or moving right over to python.
Thank you for reading this far, and if you did, you rock! I greatly appreciate you taking the time to check this out. I also wanted to mention here that, like I tweeted about yesterday, I am looking for my next job opportunity. I have a decade of experience in information technology, a graduate degree in history and undergraduate degrees in both philosophy and history, and for the last five years I have been working as a penetration tester.
I am interested in a role in computer security, I am open to red/blue/purple team work. I would also be very interested in a job doing development work. That would include frontend web dev or a junior developer role using any of the following languages: C, Ruby, or Python. I have messed with Go and Rust a little bit, but they are a little too challenging for me to take on at this time. I am comfortable doing scripting in Bash and I wrote all the HTML and CSS for this website. My academic training would make me a great addition to your team - I volunteer to write documentation in exchange for giving me an opportunity to work for you! I have done some scripting in Bash and Python for a previous role, but they were really hacky scripts. I would be a great security champion for your organization and could help drive secure design principals and help your team shift left.
Alright, that's enough of a pitch from me. Thanks for reading this far, here is one more picture of my dogs to say thanks!
Why aren't we going for walkies yet? We want to play fetch! Stop typing and let's go!!
I appreciate you taking the time to read this, internet friend. I hope you have a very nice day and a most excellent week. Cheers!