Jackson Bradford’s Website

About Page Updated

2019-10-30T11:15:00+00:00

It’s been a while since the last post, hasn’t it?

I’ve been applying to some more job listings lately and figured it was about time I pushed some sort of update— In this case, the “About” page is now accurate. The “Archive” page may be implemented at some point, maybe soon™, depending on how my job hunt goes for me in the near future.

Also, The cover picture for this post is one of the Hubble Deep Field images. It’s also one of my desktop backgrounds. I thought it looked nice.

Till next time,

–Jackson

Hello, World!

2019-02-21T13:31:46+00:00

My first non-placeholder post! How about that? I’m looking forward to adding more to this website in the near future. First step: fix the navbar icon. Hopefully I’ll get that done tonight. Second step: add a resume page. Maybe I’ll have that live by tomorrow night. After that… well, I suppose I’ll think of something else by the time I get there.

On a side note, I just got back from the UT science & technology career fair. I had a somewhat successful excursion, though there were few companies with a focus on Physics (let alone Astronomy) research—most of the attending employers seemed to have a strong (though understandable) preference for CS majors. I ended up broadening my horizons and conversing with recruiters of a few companies that, while they may not have been particularly related to Astronomy or Physics, had a machine learning aspect to which I could relate.

I also attempted to strike up conversation with front-end web developer recruiters from Yahoo!, and quickly realized that the practical experience I have in creating this static website is not enough to make up for the extensive formal education in terminology that CS majors enjoy when it comes to web development. Additionally, recruiters seemed to desire someone with experience in developing full-stack, dynamic websites with databases. While I’ve taken a Codecademy course on SQL, I currently have no experience with PHP or Apache, and I am reluctant to spend what could potentially be $50 a month on LAMP(or similar stack)-capable hosting through AWS. I’ll probably figure something out eventually, but for now this website will be static. I should also brush up on my technical lingo. Best to be able to answer quickly and concisely when asked what a data structure is, even if I know I’ve used plenty of arrays/lists/etc. in the scripts I’ve written.

Lastly, I am aware that the CSS and HTML files for this site are… kind of a mess, with commented-out sections and redundancies everywhere. I’ll have to clean it up at some point, but that probably won’t be until I finish editing the layout for all page types (homepage is mostly finished at this point).

Till next time,

–Jackson

Post #3

2019-02-17T16:41:21+00:00

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

# coding: utf8
@decorator(param=1)
def f(x):
    """ Syntax Highlighting Demo
	@param x Parameter"""
    s = ("Test", 2+3, {'a': 'b'}, x)   #Comment
    print s[0].lower()

class Foo:
    def __init__(self):
        byte_string = 'newline:\n also newline:\x0a'
        text_string = u"Cyrillic Я is \u042f. Oops: \u042g"
        self.makeSense(whatever=1)

    def makeSense(self, whatever):
        self.sense = whatever

x = len('abc')
print(f.__doc__)

require "test"
CONSTANT = 777

# Sample comment

class Module::Class
  include Testcase

  render :action => 'foo'
  def foo(parameter)
    @parameter = parameter
  end

  local_var = eval <<-"FOO";\
  printIndex "Hello world!"
  And now this is heredoc!
  printIndex "Hello world again!"
  FOO
  foo("#{$GLOBAL_TIME >> $`} is \Z sample \"string\"" * 777);
  if ($1 =~ /sample regular expression/ni) then
  begin
    puts %W(sample words), CONSTANT, :fooo;
    do_something :action => "action"
  end
  expect{counter[0]}.to_be eq 1
  1.upto(@@n) do |index| printIndex 'Hello' + index end
  \\\\\\\\\
  end
end