The worst possible thing you could say to yourself when starting something for the first (or second, third, fourth, or... tenth) time is: How hard could it be?

I've been working with markup languages since middle school, and I've been writing on a personal or professional level for about as long. I also have a halfway decent eye for layout and formatting (at least that's what my mom tells me). So how is it that I have made it ten years without a personal website? Lack of time, for the most part. College was busy. Finding a job was a full time job. Leaving that job, moving to a new state, and finding another job was exhausting.

But then, an opportunity: I started working as a front end developer for Mindera Software, immersing me in the world of web design and operations. It didn't take long to realize that I was in a solid position to start building a real personal website, and not just a pre-packaged deal from Wix or Squarespace.

Building a website is like having a pet. It's a long term investment. Appropriately it's like having a cat.

The first few weeks are critical to the long term behavior of the cat and the success of your longer term relationship. So, in addition to Spike, I now have another cat:

Well, I do a lot of things: travelling, cartography, caving, hiking, photography, custom gear builds... so much stuff to share! But I also need a place to host a resume and CV for professional development. So, mentally I now have a cat (my website) who just had litter of cats running around like this:

And, wow!, I can add things like a contact submission form, and expandable containers in my CV to show more information, the blog can have a dynamic library that is searchable and orderable, and the photo galleries can be also dynamic and searchable. Lots of options, lots of things I can do!

My cat now has grand kittens:

You can see where I am going with this. In the bell curve of knowledge and experience I was in the dangerous part where I knew enough to get started but not enough to know what I didn't know. This is a spectacular example of myself navigating the Dunning-Kruger effect.

So, I need to take a step back and shuffle some of these cats off for temporary foster homes. In the mean time I have to build a place for them to live, grow, and thrive. This brings me to the current scope of work for this website:

1. A simple structure for each html page that allows some centralized control over the entire document.
2. About, Resume, and CV pages
3. Basic Blog
4. Home page

This list of initial objectives gives me a framework to branch off from (Objective 1) as well as the first basic endpoints for users to consume (Objective 2) and then some fodder to play around with dyanmic webpages (Objective 3) all of which is content I can use to replace my really bare home page (Objective 4).

You'll notice that there are no mentions here yet of galleries. That's because my photos are already well known and seen on my social media channels like Facebook, Flickr, and published works. That can come in the next round of work.

Right now I am on part 3 of this (obviously). This article was written in part to give myself a blog entry to play with. The second and fourth objectives are fairly simple, I just want content in those pages so I have places to direct folks. The first objective is the most technically involved step as it uses javascript files to lay the groundwork for being able to manage the entire website if I want to play with globally. A more detailed look at the first objective is coming in the next blog post.