About

About Me

Professional

I am a web developer with going on 14 years experience in the industry. For the duration of that time I have worked mostly in the realm of web development from full stack applications to web service APIs. Though there are brief periods of using Flutter for mobile development and working in big data using Hadoop. For the the last few years I have been working with Amazon Web Services using Typescript to build IoT web infrastructure at Allegion. My education started at University of Arizona studying Mathematics however life had other plans. I found myself transferring to University of Delaware where I earned a B.S. in Computer Science in January of 2011. A few years later I went on to also earn a M.S. from Johns Hopkins University in 2015.

Personal

I was born in north Jersey but raised mostly in rural Delaware. Technology and tinkering were pretty normal. Wether it was fiddling with a Commodore 64, making pages for my Quake Team Fortress clan, or cobbling together a fuel injection system from junkyard parts for my first car. When faced with tuition I couldn’t afford I leaned on my success in JROTC choosing to join the Air Force. After serving six years maintaining avionics systems on F-16s the next step was attending college. Which is how we are here now. Living in rural Pennsylvania.

Besides spending time with my family I try to stay busy. In my spare time sometimes I am out on my KLR 650 looking for a new trail, wrenching on my car, building something in the workshop, or playing with my two dogs (Gertrude and Mille).

About the Site

Purpose

This blog is effectively a place for me to document my projects and experimentations that involve technology. I find using just GitHub to look through someone’s work can be challenging. Github can be cluttered with little one off trials and forks without much actual change to fit one small change. A site like this where I can provide that adding context and pictures, highlighting the specific projects I find interesting is more useful. It is useful in conveying the details but also presenting in a way that does not necessarily require an understanding of the underlying technology.

Technology

This site itself is an experimentation. Having worked with other static site generators such as Hugo and Jekyll I decided to look to see what is currently trending. During my research I came across 11ty which hit much of what I would look for in a tool. 11ty has deployments by at least a few large shops. In this case there is Google, jamstack.org, Jetbrains, and many others. Next I looked at flexibility. 11ty appears quite flexible in configuration with a much less opinionated approach than some other static site generation tools. Finally, it recompiles the page rather quick. Especially when using watch mode in development. By time I am looking at the browser most of the time it has completed the build and refreshed the page.

In choosing configuration options, the number of officially supported template languages are numerous. In this case I chose to use Nunjucks which I had never previously used. One could even implementing their own handling using Hiccup for instance. Styles are handled by TailwindCSS. I had very little experience working with Tailwind prior to this however it has become an industry standard and I should learn the basics. Wanting to get up running quickly I looked for a theme that had a structure I liked and picked Eleventy Excellence as my starting point but over time I am sure it will diverge.

Since I already use Vercel for other projects it is also where this lives. They already have a zero configuration deployment option for 11ty. The only changes required to get up and running was that I use Bun instead of standard NodeJS so I had to update the default commands used to build, test, and install dependencies. It also supports lambda style functions which I needed to support my contact form implementation. The primary reason is momentum as I have adopted it in most of my personal projects that require a Node runtime. Some of the perks are that Typescript it is effectively first class, Node.js compatible, and otherwise comes packaged with utilities I would have to install myself if I used the official NodeJS install.

Anyway, that is enough about me and this site.


HAPPY HACKING,
Rigoberto P.