Welcome!

It is about time I got a personal website up and running…

As part of an effort to delve into open source, both as a contributor and user, I’ve graciously bootstrapped this website theme from Minimal Mistakes. It seemed to have everything I was looking for - a clean UI, a lightweight implementation, easy to configure and update, seamless configuration with GitHub Pages, and more (especially since I’ve used neither Ruby nor Jekyll before). I hope this will be a fun (and continued) project that allows me to not only expand my skills and develop a portfolio and a space to collect my thoughts, research, and interests, but to also gain experience getting involved with the open source community!

Previously, I (foolishly) did not consider using a community driven theme. Maybe I was just eager to test my newfound skills (or really, my patience) with perfecting a UI layout and theme (I’d like to think I spend most of my time on the backend, but I do appreciate aesthetic and accessible design). Not sooner could I have realized the benefit from forking an existing repo that not only supports my needs, but also has a community that is actively contributing to and updating the work. Regretfully, I have applied this thinking of “build a solution first” not only to the design and development of a personal website, but also many other tools and systems I’ve built in personal projects. There is a time and place to develop an in-house solution (and a great deal to learn from while doing it! but more on that later), but there is also a great benefit to be gained by using or modifying existing solutions (or better yet, using them and contributing to them!).

Of course, when push came to shove and I was ready to get a site up and running, the old computer science adage “make the common case fast” won over, and I found myself instead wishing for the easiest implementation possible to get a working solution up and running. Thus, here we are!

I hope to archive some of my learnings here as I embark on my journey through computer science and software engineering. Over the next few months, my activity may focus on finding the balance between using open source software and developing my own solutions, as well as what there is to learn from doing both. And of course, random musings, thoughts, and interests are always fair game. You might find some of my more incremental development and learning over on my GitHub profile, but I will try to update on it here as well.

Head over to the About page to learn a bit more about me and what I am interested in!

Email me at the link on the side or at: jwiaduck+github AT umich DOT edu