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