/u/7434365
/joeiddon

About

Me

I dabble in some JavaScript, Python and some C++. I've also played in some other languages like ML and Java but wouldn't consider myself proficient in them. In addition, I know enough OpenScad to allow me to code the 3d designs that I send to my printer.

In my spare time, you will find me over on stackoverflow.com. I have built up a reasonable standing there (10,000 reputation, and about 700 posts) and my claim to fame is that one week I had gained the second most reputation out of the nine million users, surpassing Jon Skeet, however I must admit that I spent nearly that entire week on the site - hitting the 200 rep cap (excluding accepts) every day and that is way above my usual commitment. The majority of questions I answer there are Python-based as these are commonly asked and I enjoy helping out new coders who often pick this language to get into programming.

The Website

This website was created on June 13th, 2017 with usability the priority over design. Since the initial formatting, I have slowly been collating my projets here. You can view the source here on GitHub.

It is hosted by Github (hence the .github.io domain name). My original aim was to write the entire thing from scratch, however the HTML and CSS for the banner (menu) at the top and the styling is all identical for every page on the site so it would be ideal to have the http server insert each post between these two HTML snippets. I did, in the future, write a Python TCPServer that inherited from the http.BaseHTTPRequestHandler which implemented this functionality, however to have my whole site hosted from, for instance, a Google VM instance would end up being slow and/or cost money. So as a result, I settled on sticking with Github.

To implement this HTML-post-inserting, I discovered I could use some basic Jekyll functionality that Github Pages natively supports. Initially I was against this idea since I am, in general, against using frameworks and high-level packages (since I always find myself fighting against them or wisihig they were written in a different way), but in the end it proved to be very simple. All that was required was to create a _layouts directory in the root of the repo and then create this "template" HTML file. I named this default.html. In this file, I wrote the banner HTML and linked my stylesheets and then used a special Jekyll-defined flag which signals to Jekyll to insert every HTML file which contains layout: default in the Jekyll metadata to this place in the HTML. As I say, I would prefer to not have to rely on Jekyll, but since the functionality is there, I thought I'd take advantage of it.