quick origin story: I taught myself some coding and layout design from ... being a tween on the internet in the LJ/MySpace days, and then an internship and a few specific projects convinced me after nearly an entire English major that I enjoyed the combo of tech and graphic design that was web design in the mumblemumbleaughts enough to want to try to take a separate certificate.

Shockingly, I know, this did not get me a fantastic new frontend career. It did get me some useful skills and an iMac that lasted about a decade, and I also got some experience freelancing for friends and so on that sort of punted my day jobs into tech-adjacent stuff, which has been interesting, and wildly all over the place, in terms of what I do. But, I've never stopped being interested or trying to learn things! Mostly from free courses on the internet or squinting a lot at other people's code. Documentation is my friend :D :D

I enjoy that Github really emphasizes REMEMBER TO MAKE A DAMN README, version management sooths my soul, and I love the number of open sourcers around here (even if it's no longer its own thing). Plus, I keep trying to save things to spruce up my Obsidian -- so I figured I'd make an account and play around.

I also write 🖥, play ttrpgs 🎲 (and ttrpgs📄), read a lot of articles📰... lose a lot of bookmarks📌...
I like to draw and make 3-D art but I've kind of accepted that I'm not great at it. Still, I do want to practice more.
I have ADHD that impressed the neuropsych tester; also epilepsy and migraines, basically fυсκ^* my brain.

* _{I was trying to censor myself without censoring myself there, but quick PSA: never do that for any real length of time. The unicode, I mean. Please don't do it for fancy display names and stuff. Screen readers can't figure it out, and it's not really...cool to use characters from other languages to look like English. I know literally everyone on the internet does it at this point. It's not great.}

Ahem. One of my other passions is championing accessibility/disability rights! In life, in code, and in writing/roleplay.

To pay the rent I'm currently working freelance/contract as a (they don't usually SAY this, but it totally is) reinforcement learning specialist for LLMs and the like. ....But it's way funnier to say I gaslight AIs which is not ...not true, depending on what project I'm working on.

• Markdown ✔

  • I got comfy with it via Obsidian, weirdly, so I have a "dialect" (dashes rather than asterisks for bullets is prolly the tell) but it's everywhere, so I know a lot of variations. (Plurk is an especially weird one.)

• HTML (and XHTML): ✔

  • serious question: does anyone even use XHTML? I remember when I was first learning web design the course instructor was very this is the future ...yeah nah

• Wikitext of various flavors ✔

• JSON ✔

  • pranked myself on this one since last time: it comes in handy at work so i'm good with it now.
    • it feels like cheating in much the way XML (see below) does to me, but i'm starting to think that's actually just the way "codes with not a lot of predefined variables/keys/etc" feel to someone who started on HTML, which is nothing but a big dictionary.

• CSS 🆗

  • let's call this "four years of high school spanish" fluency: can read, can write[make adjustments to existing CSS or use reference to compose]... "speaking" [knowing the "grammar" and composing from scratch intuitively]... not so much
  • on the other hand I know a lot of weird inline CSS that most people would advise you put in a stylesheet? so, uh, hmu for all your email and single-post CMS coding.
  • I'm currently trying to learn this (also Spanish!) more fluently

* _{also XML, but I feel like XML is kind of cheater markup, since you're the one defining the tags. Yes, I can follow my own rules in such a way that a computer knows the difference between two things? Which is, I guess, sort of all any code is, but. for someone who started with HTML, it feels like saying I speak my own conlang well. Yes, it has phonemes and grammatical structures I didn't invent but I didn't have to learn it.)}

• SQL ✔ just basics, but i have a shiny certificate and all that
  • my household got into an es-cue-ell vs sequel argument before I even knew that was a thing and then we hit Wikipedia. I personally enjoy the reason it's historically referred to as "Sequel"
    • So how do you say it?
• Python 📚 I need to actually sit down and practice; in the meantime I can understand what it's doing pretty easily, so I interact with it easily
• JavaScript is my next one ?? what the heck is time
  • tho... technically since I'm using certain Obsidian plugins I'm getting a crashcourse in Javascript here and there (and also DQL and whatever other -QLs people choose to use; plus some Handlebar/Moustache/etc.
    • SQL made adapting to all other query languages pretty easy: do recommend

• English ✔ born into this bizarre language
• Spanish 🆗 in the exact way mentioned in the CSS section
• French ❓ more recently studied and therefore slightly better pronounced, but with a smaller vocabulary. I'd like to go back to it.
  • weird but true: if you have trouble with your Rs in English as a little kid, maybe you will do well with French Rs: I do!
• Welsh 📚 Currently studying (again). Have loved it for a long, long time. I'm a nerd and it's kind of a long story (but not that long - I got introduced to a couple different Welsh-set series at a young age).
• ASL 📚 have wanted to learn since I was taught basics in kindergarten, but. Need someone to practice with and to be held accountable.
• German ❌
  • ...tbf I retained a great grasp on the theory of German, but I doubt I could remember much vocab.

_plus...

• I'm also learning Morse Code! for funsies! will probably *never* master that one
• Music in three clefs, yeah that's right, I was a viola
• I made a conlang joke and now I'm actually making a naming language sigh