Welcome. Here to get to know me? Let me help!
I'm known for building software solutions.
I obsess over performance optimization.
I compile embedded Linux kernels for fun.
I've managed people, infrastructure, content, projects, and budgets.
I'm extroverted, and despite all this propaganda, humble by nature.
Click on image to close.
Good news, my resume is condensed, but all the granular details of my career are still available on LinkedIn. Lastly, I'm on Twitter.
Here are ten skills I'm known for in my career...
Throughout years, I've build, maintained, configured, improved and contributed to many projects for my clients, employers, and community. Some are still thriving, some can only be seen on the internet archives, and I got screenshots for the few remaining that weren't archived well.
Still online, maintained, and available:
But thankfully available on archive.org:
Not archived, screenshots only.
32 active +
21 inactive +
6 forgotten +
1 this site = 60 total sites
It wasn't long ago when "webmasters" had to design the sites they built, and frankly I still enjoy designing layouts and user interfaces just as much I like coding. Below are a few of my designs, I'm including the date to provide context, because while they may not be fancy today, they were trendy for their time.
Here's a sneak peek into a few of them...
Albuquerque's Drupal web development team.
Online store for a brand of luxury chinaware.
Multilingual site for a music publishing label.
Online store for a software security product.
Site for major aviation industry conference.
Due to their restrictive rendering limitations HTML emails are a different ballgame as everything is in a table.
Marketing site for a children fashion brand.
Site for a donor-supported nonprofit research organization.
At a technical high-school, I learned how to read circuit schematics, solder components, and even make printed circuit boards.
I started with building electronic kits in my youth,
and later in life got involved with micro devices, first with
Arduino, and finally growing into full on systems on a chip
devices that run custom Linux kernels that I compile,
and best off all, I've been fortunate enough to be able to
use and develop these skills throughout my career as well.
Some of my micro devices and the LED matrix they control...
Thankfully many of the books that paved my path to knowledge are now freely available on YouTube. Included couple of lectures in there too just for a good measure.
Professor Carl Hayden Smith
Just like everyone else I was worried about my family's safety. Covid crystallized the realization of how unprepared we were for such an event. Not only did we not have any anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-depressant, anti-inflammatory remedies at our disposal, but the prospect of obtaining them was also grim, as nobody dared to visit a medical office during the pandemic unless they absolutely had to.
I turned to the internet for a solution
Soon I learned that parallel to the western medicinal system, a Russian equivalent system exist, essentially for every Aspirin and Prozac there's an Asprinof and Prozacovich available online, with very similar molecular structure, give or take an extra atom attached or removed here and there.
More interestingly, I learned that currently there are many new cutting edge experimental medications available, that for one reason or another have not yet been approved by the slow and rigorous FDA approval process.
I've compiled my findings into detailed spreadsheets that I plan to share here soon!
Been painting all my life here are some examples:
Learned Photoshop in college just to make album covers:
Then learned Illustrator been useful for logo designs:
Abstract Love Collection circa 2022:
The mousepad, stickers and CDs were for a conference gift bag, but the garden photos are much better examples, as everything you see was put together by my very own two hands, from planting the flowers, to installing the wood trimmings, drainage boxes, lights, and most importantly, laying all the river pebbles.
And before you knew, it grew into a record label.
My vocals are included in over 60 released singles, many of which can be heard on various online music platforms.
Ever since I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator, I saw how superior vector graphics were to rasterized bitmaps, in terms of lossless render quality, resolution independence, and file-size.
While browsers took decades to finally adopt the format, somehow it still remains largely underutilized by developers.
SVG files are my bread and butter for the following reasons...
Resolution independence is celebrated every fourth of July, when vectors victoriously defeated the tyranny of pixelation. Jokes aside, what it really means is "one size fits all" as the same SVG displayed at 100 pixels wide can be printed on a 10 feet banner without the pixelation that was the annoying byproduct of the old low-res bitmap images.
Did you notice the background image animation on this site?
I'm not sure if I could've done it as easily using CSS rules
alone, because while CSS animations work great on page elements
their use is not as straight forward on background images.
Filters are another unique feature of SVG because they
include some filters that are not available to CSS, and
best of all all the filter parameters can be animated,
allowing for creation of visually impressive effects.
Unlike bitmap images that grow heavier by increasing image size, SVGs don't. This is because all vector objects are made of math formulas that render the same shape regardless of the image size so they remain exponentially lighter than their bitmap counterparts. The only exception is when bitmap images are encapsulated inside a SVG file, which is an excellent trick for creating image sprites.
SVG files can be used as a container to encapsulate bitmap images.
Why you may ask? One good reason is to make a bitmap image fancier
by non-destructively adding extra layers of dynamic graphic elements,
for instance "you are here" arrows on a map, or reveal animations, etc.
Another good reason is to create smart image sprites, why smart?
Because you can name each frame of those sprite images and use
the name to summon that exact frame like sprite.svg#cat vs. #dog.
I've used this trick to reduce the number of http requests by a
quarter because each stripe contains at least 4 images, hence
reducing page load time.
I once worked for a company that had five unique products each with their own logo, however the logos where cohesive as they followed a common theme, for instance they all shared the same exact size orange circle around their icon, the same exact gray dotted line under their text with the same ® mark at the end of each name, so instead of creating 5 separate SVG files, I created only one, with both the common and the unique parts as individual symbols, then using those symbols I created a smart sprite that could summon each logo with their unique ID.
If the five reasons above didn't fully convince you that SVGs are the best things since sliced tortillas, I doubt this would either, but I'm not the type to give up easy, so did you know all elements in SVG files can be fully styled using CSS? All it takes is assigning a class to the element, even that's not fully necessary if you're hardcore enough with your CSS rule, after all you can always use nth-child if push comes to shove. But the point is, you can customize something that was meant to be fully customizable from the get go even further, allowing for creation of responsive logos that render completely differently depending on the width and height alloted to them, or logos that change colors depending on light mode / dark mode display preferences, without having to create multiple versions of the graphics.
Saving the best for the last, SVG files can be used inline, as in, their code can be directly inserted inside a page html, hence completely eliminating the need for loading external resources such as multiple icons, reducing the number of http requests and improving page load performance.
Pingdom / HubSpot
I'm obsessed with page load times
Don't believe me? See how fast this site loads!
Try it on Pingdom Speed Test
Or HubSpot's Website Grader
While at it try some other sites for comparison, and
considering you won't come across perfect scores often,
would you like to know my secret for site performance?
SVG / WEBP / Emojis to the rescue
I've already evangelized about the benefits of SVG files for icons and illustrations, but for photo-realistic images the new WEBP standard offers the best features of both PNG (transparency / lossless compression) and JPG (lossy compression / small file size) depending on the use case requirements.
An even more clever way to improve page load speed is using standard unicode emojis for common graphical elements such as arrows, home, phone or email icons. I used them to distinctively represent each of the four categories of this site, saving on the trouble and the file-size of creating suitable icons, no reason to reinvent the wheel if good wheels already exist.
Lastly, lazy loading of images below the page fold can make a noticeable performance impact. All these tricks reduce the number of http requests your page needs to perform before rendering, leading to faster load times and better user experience.
No scripts is the best script
There's a trend amongst developers for wanting to use the latest and greatest front-end frameworks, as well as a trend amongst marketing professionals for wanting to include the maximum number of analytics and tracking tools they can find on every single page on a site, regardless of the performance toll. Not every page needs React, vanilla javascript can still go a long way before the need for any framework.
While as a developer I understand the desire to use the latest leading edge frameworks for the bragging rights on one's resume, I can't be as forgiving towards marketing professionals, as they know how shaving 100 milliseconds of latency improves sales by at least 1%, yet they still participate in the self defeating practice of over-scripting their web sites.
Heydon Pickering's opinion of React is funny and enlightening.
Multiple servers cut download time
Keeping your code and visual assets on separate servers will also improve your site performance, and this is where having a dynamic web infrastructure can really shine. This website is hosted on AWS, and with Route52 it's so easy to create subdomains like files.yourdomain.com to divide the bandwidth heavy task of serving large files between a multitude of servers, and avoid slowing down the main web server.
Today one can walk into a hardware store and buy a jug of pesticide, no questions asked, and that rat poison can easily kill a small village in the hands of a maniac.
But what one can't do today, is to walk into a pharmacy and buy antibiotics. To do that, we must first call a doctor, wait a few weeks for the next available appointment, pay for the visit, and even then there are no guarantees if the prescription gets issued! Some doctors who may know their patient for only few minutes can play God by withholding their cure, which can turn a simple sinus infection into pneumonia, or worse yet, sepsis if left untreated.
So far that was just the tip of the iceberg, when life saving antibiotics are so hard to obtain, imagine how difficult it is to get restricted prescriptions, let's say ADHD meds or pain killers, for those seeking such remedies for their condition. Many doctors simply aren't even allowed to prescribe certain medications because their clinic or liability insurer have specific policies forbidding them, for instance Spravato nasal spray, an antidepressant.
The insanity of the prohibition story gets even more absurd with some of the scheduled compounds. Every night when we fall sleep in our bodies we produce indigenous dimethyl tryptamine, a compound responsible for our ability to have visually realistic dreams, yet that same molecule that we all safely produce and consume on nightly basis is federally banned by the DEA!
While living in Seattle, every fall during the cool rainy season "wavy caps" mushrooms grew wild in our yard and in many outdoor parks, but if anyone picked them and ate them they'd be committing a felony due the psilocybin they contain, which is also banned by DEA. Yet there are no laws for death caps or any other fatally poisonous fungi.
All these prohibitionist policies are the result of sensationalized fear, enshrined into law by people without any first hand knowledge or experience with what they've banned.
I don't ski and I don't ride horses, and every year I hear stories about people losing their lives or getting seriously injured while on the slopes, or riding horses, ATVs, etc. Yet we don't ban these activities based on the bad luck, poor decisions or irresponsible actions of those involved in the reported incidents.
I hope to witness the day when responsible adults can be free to ingest whatever they desire without the fear of prosecution by law or the stigmatization of our society, and organizations like MAPS are at the forefront of such efforts.
Perhaps we can learn from Mexico, where most prescription medications are sold over the counter, yet they have a lower addiction rate and homelessness per capita than united states. When the responsibility of restraint and self control rests on the individual's shoulders and not the government's, people generally tend to follow the mankind's inherent self-preservation rule we are born with, and that's all I need to advocate about.
While not all of them, here are some things I find fun...
You know what's not fun?
Reinventing the damn wheel!
Which is why why starting a software project
from scratch can be so daunting.
As a developer, I'm a huge advocate for using open source projects. There's nothing more fun than getting an idea, then looking through Github to see if any related code for it already exists, and even if it's not exactly what we wished for, it'll be a great starting point for getting that idea off the ground at the very least.
When I first started my software career Github didn't exist, during those dark days I was forced to start from scratch, including creating my own content management system, and while educational, it didn't have a fraction of the bells and whistles that came standard with Drupal which I later opted for.
Open source is the main reason why software quality has improved so dramatically ever since Github showed up, or why AI apps have made such huge leaps in the past few years, simply put, people's work can inspire others.
Speaking of fun, if you love board games (and I hope you do), I'm here to argue that Chinese Checkers is the single greatest board game of all times, and I come prepared with reasons to back my wild claim!