I was neither in a good place back then or the most motivated, so, shocker, this did not get me a fantastic new frontend career. It did get me some useful skills and an iMac that lasted about a decade, and I also got some experience freelancing for friends and so on that sort of punted my day jobs into tech-adjacent stuff, which has been interesting and wildly all over the place in terms of what I do.

Anyway: I've never stopped being interested or trying to learn things! Mostly from free courses on the internet or squinting a lot at other people's code. Documentation is my friend :D :D

I enjoy that Github really leans on MAKE A DAMN README and I love the open source ideology, and I keep trying to save things to spruce up my Obsidian; so I figured I'd make an account and play around.

I also write 🖥, play ttrpgs 🎲 (and ttrpgs📄), read a lot of articles📰... lose a lot of bookmarks📌...
I like to draw and make 3-D art but I've kind of accepted that I'm not great at it. Still, I do want to practice more.
I have ADHD that impressed the neuropsych examiner; also epilepsy and migraines, basically fυсκ^* my brain.

* _{I was trying to censor myself without censoring myself there, but never do that for any real length of time.
The unicode, I mean. Please don't do it for fancy display names and stuff. Screen readers can't figure it out, and it's not really...cool to use characters from other languages to look like English. I know literally everyone on earth does it. It's still not great.}

Ahem. One of my other passions is championing disability rights! In life, in code, and in writing/roleplay.

To pay the rent I'm currently working freelance/contract as a (they don't usually SAY this, but it totally is) reinforcement learning specialist for LLMs and the like. ....But it's way funnier to say I gaslight AIs which is not ...not true, depending on what project I'm working on.

• Markdown ✔ (esp the Obsidian flavor, but I use it for my job, too, so)
• HTML and XHTML: ✔
  • legitimate question: does anyone even use XHTML? I remember when I was first learning web design the course instructor was very this is the future yeah nah
• Wikitext of various flavors ✔
• CSS ❓
  • let's call this "four years of high school spanish" fluency: can read, can write[make adjustments to existing CSS or use reference to compose], speaking[ie writing from scratch or memory]... not so much
  • I'm currently trying to learn this more fl
• JSON ✔
  • pranked myself on this one since last time: it comes in handy at work so i'm definitely good with it.
    • it feels like cheating in much the way XML (see below) does to me, but i'm starting to think that's actually just "codes with not a lot of predefined variables/keys/etc" to someone who started on html, which is nothing but a big dictionary. i think this is the "where's the bathroom / i speak english" level of dropped-in immersion

^{(also, XML: which I also use at work, but I feel like XML is kind of cheater markup if you're the one defining the tags. Yes, I can follow my own rules in such a way that a computer knows the difference between two things, I guess? Which is, I guess, sort of all code is, but. It's like saying I speak my own conlang well. Yes, it has phonemes and grammatical structures I didn't invent but I didn't have to learn it.)}

• SQL ✔ just basics, but i have a shiny certificate and all that
  • my household got into an es-cue-ell vs sequel argument (I say S Q L) before I even knew that was a thing and then we hit Wikipedia
  • I enjoy the reason it's historically referred to as "Sequel". I still say SQL.
    • So how do you say it?
• Python 📚 currently learning
• JavaScript's my next one oops apparently I'm at least teaching myself JS at a basic level because I got too interested in integrating Spotify in a new way and now I have a slow-burning project idea
  • Tho technically since I'm using the Obsidian Dataview plugin, and some others, I'm getting a crashcourse in Javascript here and there
    • (and also DQL and whatever other -QLs people choose to use; plus some Handlebar/Moustache/etc.
    • SQL made adapting to all other query languages pretty easy: do recommend)

• ASL 📚 currently learning
  • and would love love love anyone to sign with! HMU!
• English ✔ born into this bizarre language
• Spanish ❓ in the exact way mentioned in the CSS section
  • somehow, I managed to translate Don Quixote into English in HS but can't have a fluent conversation?!
  • I can eavesdrop pretty accurately though so maybe it's just confidence
• French ❓ more recently studied and therefore slightly better pronounced, but with a smaller vocabulary
  • I would really like to master French tbh
  • weird but true: if you have trouble with your Rs in English as a little kid, maybe you will do better with French Rs: I do!
• Welsh ⁉
  • keep trying to learn it, I love it, I love the history, have never committed well enough.
  • this is not a romance language. OR a germanic language. and that's beautiful. but DAMN.
• German ❌
  • ...tbf I retained a great grasp on the theory of German, but I doubt I could remember much vocab.
    • if you are seriously depressed, have weirdly escalating epilepsy, and undiagnosed (not that I ...knew) ADHD: take a year off
• not a spoken language but I'm also learning Morse Code! for funsies! will probably never master that one
• I can read music fluently??