Hello, World!

Surprising to everyone but my friends: I love words, and I love to write.

I've enjoyed it ever since I was a child. I carried around notebooks and stayed up well into the night typing into Google Docs. I wrote poetry, lined my arms with song lyrics, and edited my friends' school essays. Not a lot of people expect this from a STEM major; they figure I live in a world of numbers and code. I don't blame them, considering I wanted to pursue something math-y my entire life. However, there was a brief period in middle school where I was convinced I would be a journalist.

In my past writing classes, I think a lot of my classmates struggled to meet the minimum page requirement. You always hear "tips and tricks" to increase your word count (and those "tips" usually tell you to replace concise, beautiful words with clunky, long, unnecessary phrases). I have the opposite problem: I struggle to keep my essays short. It's less that I ramble, and more that I just have a lot to say. For those awful timed essays in high school, I roughly outlined my plan in five minutes, then spent the rest of the hour scribbling as fast as I could. I never once had a class where I didn't ask for extra paper.

Once I entered college, most of my writing was contained in fun, off-hours activities. I write letters to my friends, and leave post-it notes with jokes and drawings on them for my roommate. I have a (perhaps unreasonably) large collection of cards, cardstock, and pens, just waiting to be used.

I've been working on this website for about three months now. An older version was much more basic, and certainly much less cool. I didn't know much about web development, so I learned some basic HTML and wrote it entirely in vanilla HTML/CSS over the course of a few weeks. I was pretty proud of it at first, but an acquaintance of mine suggested I switch to Jekyll instead. Having a busy semester, I tabled that task, and told myself I'd get around to it when the chaos had ended. So today, now on break, I kicked up my feet, wrapped myself in a blanket, and poured through tutorials and documentation. It took a while (as I write this, it is past 3am - where does the time go?), but I finally found a point where I'm happy with what I made.

I hope to populate my site with more fun, quirky things that I love. I still have to migrate a wonderful gallery of my favorite pictures from the old site, and update my research projects to accommodate several conferences I will be attending (soon!). Throughout it all, I look foward to learning more: becoming a better coder, and a better writer.

To those that know me, I say: yes, I know I'm a total nerd.

And to everyone else, I say: Hello, World!