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Dusty, I know. But rest assured I’m on a mission to sweep these dust bunnies away. Very soon!

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Updates Are-A-Comin!

July 31, 2018

Whoa, we’re in prime hurricane season already! Time flies. The four month lag between this post and the last is, I admit, inexcusable. I do have good reasons for the time gap. Most predictably, work consumed a lot of my time. I was busy working on several exciting projects in those four months. Really, I was.

Gosh, tomorrow starts August!

This will be a quick post, as I’m in the midst of redesigning and relaunching a new version of this site. So excuse the dust and the emptiness for now. Enjoy the flock of birds on my homepage. Exciting things are on their way.

A Hariy Few Weeks

March 18, 2018

The lag time between my first blog post and this one is embarrassing, but I do have a fair explanation. I’ve been on a mission to streamline processes that affect both my professional and domestic life. No better time than the few weeks before Spring arrives, which, by the way, is next Tuesday (March 21). Time flies. By streamlining, what I mean is my attempt to unburden myself and those who I work with and those within my household of time-consuming (or time-suckage) tasks that, at the end of the day, no one benefits. I’ve been on the phone with all sorts of bureaucratic institutions — too many to list here — for answers and solutions that should readily available to consumers. I’ve found that organizational hierarchies (especially with big companies or institutions, i.e., the government) fail at keeping their workers informed or connected within and among these hierarchies. If you’re wondering who I’m speaking about, I’m purposely vague here because of privacy concerns. But you’ve probably encountered similar situations where the person on the other line either knows nothing about you or your account with them or, almost by default, transfers you to another department or person only to face more of the same. It’s extremely infuriating. Customers, patients, or web users shouldn’t have to become experts in matters that are beyond them to learn. Sadly, that’s the state of affairs. For those dealing in labyrinthine processes of trying to find solutions to issues with companies or institutions, I offer this piece of advice: Take your complaints straight to the top, detailing everything that you’ve gone through in your attempts to resolve your issues. Persist. The best companies will get on your case immediately — customer service, after all, will make or break a company (in my opinion). And if you are still not getting your case heard, take to social media. The ugly aftermath of an ad advocating violence against women that Snapchat is currently experiencing with Rihanna, which she rightfully responded to by telling her millions of followers to delete the Snapchat app, is admittedly a high-profile example. Rihanna’s calls to remove Snapchat worked. And now the company is listening. You don’t need a million followers to get a reasonable response from companies or organizations that have done you wrong. You need the right hashtags, you need to direct your complaint to the proper channels and people, and you need the public to see your complaint. Once the wrongdoing is out in the Interwebs, the universe will act accordingly (and so too, we hope, the companies or institutions in question).

My point with all of this is: (1) Decluttering your home space is essential to a clear mind — don’t procrastinate with the easy tasks like organizing your workspace and be ok with throwing out (or donating) crap. (2) I hate being placed on hold — companies take note, you’ll lose brand loyalty when you put customers on hold for more than a minute (I would address local and federal government agencies, but I feel like many of these places are lost causes already. Waiting half an hour to have a business question answered by a state organization is beyond any reason. (3) Customers, patients, or Internet users, shouldn’t have to master the organizational structure or processes at companies that people hired at said places should already have the knowledge to help and to streamline any issues that they might confront. If I know your job better than you do, then there’s a problem. (4) Finally, persistence isn’t written enough about (#IMHO). Don’t give up, especially if you need answers or solutions immediately. Like I said, convey your issues to top management if you’re not getting anywhere with those you’ve been talking to and then take it public if your issues are falling on deaf ears. Don’t be apologetic for doing so — it wasn’t you who caused the problems.

On a brighter note, Spring is only a few days away. If you need an excuse to get moving on projects or even just getting your affairs in order (i.e., filing your taxes!), now would be a perfect time to get moving. Enjoy the longer and sunnier days. More soon.

Hello World!

February 25, 2018

A redesign of my person website has been in the works since the start of the year. With so much going on with work and catching the 2018 strain of the flu, it took me longer than I’d expected. That said, I’m excited to release an MVP of my vanity site today. It was fun to get my CLI game back on (oh how I missed it).

I decided to give the JAMstack a go, using Netlify to deploy this site. What an easy and streamlined process! I did encounter a few hiccups that caused my deployments to fail many times. Deprecated dependecies are no bueno. I was reminded by what a former web development teacher said: He told my class to expect our apps to fail a lot and often during the dev process. For this project, he was right, as I must have pushed commits to my Github repo about a thousand times after each fix to my code (yes, a tad bit OCD and paranoid). Also it’s amazing how fast web dev advances these days. What was once the it stack only a year ago or even a month ago, is being usurped by something new. Very exciting stuff, I think. There are definitely a few new JavaScript frameworks and libraries that I’m itching to try out. I feel like a nerd in a sandbox.

So here we are face-to-face, a couple of silver spoons — ah the 80s! — and now that I have this new site up, I can’t wait to fill in some of the gaps that I left open. The Works tab will be a portfolio of sorts, with projects that I’ve done that span the past decade or so. I also have a few fun projects in progress that I want to share with the universe. It’s currently empty since I haven’t figured out the best way to present my work (so many options). Truth be told, I wanted to build a slideshow of kittens instead of leaving the section blank, but I thought better of it since the Internet is meowed out.

If you want to reach me, shoot me an message in the Contact tab, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. For now, “Hello world” (again).

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