Why This Site Exists

I'll be honest: this site exists because of a fair amount of late nights, too much coffee, and what my professors probably would have called "productive procrastination." It started in a web design class in college. Between basic web design classes and capstone projects, I needed a project I could reuse across multiple classes and years, so instead of starting from scratch every semester, I built something that could grow with me. The Projects page used to be full of class reports from those years; these days it's home lab and automation work instead.

Most class projects get turned in, graded, and forgotten about. This one just kept getting used. Every time my career shifted, a new certification, a new job, a whole new branch of the Army, I'd pop back in and update it. Eventually I decided it deserved more than another patch job, so I tore it down and rebuilt it from scratch into what you're looking at now.

I'll admit it, I care more about this site than a "résumé online" probably needs. I sweated the layout, the colors, the little scroll animations, partly because I like building things and partly because I genuinely enjoy poking around in corners of tech I haven't touched before. CSS animations weren't something I knew going in. Neither was a lot of what ended up on the Interests page. I'd rather learn it wrong a few times and get it right than stay comfortable.

The accessibility work traces back to college too. One of those same classes required building to WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines, the standard the ADA points to for web accessibility, and it stuck with me: semantic HTML, keyboard-navigable menus, descriptive link and button labels, and color contrast built to that standard. Nobody's grading it anymore, but it's still the right way to build a site. If you run into anything here that isn't accessible to you, let me know on the Contact page and I'll fix it.