Some Thoughts... On Designing My New Site

It has been a while. How are you? I’m tired. It’s almost 2am here.

I’m hoping to post more here now, both about Computer Science based topics and about other things that peak my interest.

This is the first of a couple “Some Thoughts…” posts that are going to come out over the next few days. I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and trying to put more of it down.

I spent most of the night tonight redesigning/rebuilding my personal homepage. I wanted to build a page that would best help me in my path forward. I based the design off of Andy Pavlo’s site, Edward Yang’s site, my old homepage and just the general design and organization I’ve seen PhD students use.

One of the points in Matt Might’s amazing undergrad CS major advice column that’s always hit hardest with me is his emphasis of a portfolio over a resume. While building out my new homepage I’m trying to focus on that idea. My goal is a nice-looking, simple page that allows people to easily get to know me and my experience. However, since my long term goals more and more involve academia, I’m also trying to emphasize my research experience and give it a look that is familiar for those who have experience with academic personal sites.

The tweaking will continue for the foreseeable future. I’ve also come across how barren my side projects section is. In the near future I plan to build out a user level threads library and I’ll add it to the list once it’s semi-functional. Over the summer I’m also planning on building a rudimentary DBMS as I study the designs of database kernels, so that will be added as well.

Anyways, I believe it’s a huge improvement over its old form. Hopefully this more accurately represents who I am.

Written on March 30, 2017