A lot has changed between my last post and now. The most obvious thing is that I’ve got a new look for this site. This past week I finally sat down and made the move to a Jekyll blog hosted on github pages. Really unoriginal for a developer, I know. But I had tried a more unique route – using Middleman and hosting on Bluehost with some extra hosting credit I had leftover from a previous start-up venture. It was awful. I mean, I’m sure I could’ve figured out how to get some semi-automatic deployment going on with FTP or something, but who’s got time for that? It was such a hassle just getting a blog post up and running that I dreaded the thought – and, as a result, stopped posting.

Then, a couple weeks ago, I started getting into the weeds with Jekyll, learning its ins and outs with fun libraries like Bower, Grunt, and Liquid, while setting up the public API documentation for Notion.¹ It was so simple and actually enjoyable that I forced myself to spend some quality Shelby-time redoing my site, wine and falafel in hand. I found some themes by a wonderful designer Muan, picked one, customized it a tiny bit, and here we are.

I got rid of a few pages while migrating to Jekyll – namely, ones that I used as a freelancer to market myself or give info on my services/skills – because of another massive change: I got a new job!

In November of last year, I was browsing Built in Colorado to see what kind of jobs and start-up opportunities were going around in Colorado, and I found a listing for a software engineer at Notion, this amazing Internet of Things (IoT) startup right in downtown Denver. The position’s responsibilities included building the web app and internal and external APIs. APIs were a rapidly growing interest of mine at the time (and now my full-time obsession), as were the possibilities and challenges presented by APIs and IoT together, so this was an amazing opportunity for me to dive deeper into my interests and work with and learn from a baller team.

I applied, and after a series of interviews with the team and making sure we were the right fit for each other, I got the job. I moved to Denver right after the holidays. I’m absolutely loving my job and the team, and I’m extremely excited to get back into writing (and having time to do it!). I’ve got a backlog of stuff so you should see me churning out a bunch of posts soon. In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying another pot of dark coffee on this snowy Sunday morning.