Forays into Jekyll.

Truth be told I didn’t carry out any nifty “DH” coding this month – the kind of programmatic work that will serve as the a central pole in the (still fuzzy) project plan of mine. This is intentional on my part. For one, after a third-year at school filled with tedious programming assignments in a dizzying array of languages (C, HCLRS, Java, Python), I felt like not firing up Sublime more than I had to this month.

The “had to” in that sentence is important. This summer I am a software development intern at Perfect Sense Digital carrying out Back-End Java work to build a new website for CoStar. (Specifically we are implementing a “decoupled-CMS” which is a “headless” implementation. I am only mentioning these terms for SEO purposes…) With that in mind I definitely felt “coded-out” while adjusting to the first few weeks of my dayjob. Instead of bursting headlong into thorny R scripts I dusted off the Jekyll documentation and got developing this website instead.

The heavy lifting of this website, and every website in the Github Pages ecosystem, is design rather than data definition or hosting concerns. This is helpful to someone like me who wants a website to prove they haven’t been lazy all summer but still wants to be kind of lazy all summer. Thus, this website was born. I have thrown together a responsive design, handsome typesetting and an attractive landing page all without using a prebuilt theme. I did this to help continue to interface with the CSS and HTML that inhere a Github Pages site since I won’t really get much exposure to them at work this summer. The project repo is on Github if you would like to take a look. Plenty of the design sensibilities have been gleaned from Puzzle Poesis on which I work closely with Brad to design and maintain.

Next month, I plan to dig into a few more fiction works and then jump into that lovely, “DH” coding we all hear about on Medium and then quickly skim through. Here’s to hoping it comes out ok!