Welcome to My Website

Hello, friends! Welcome to the very first article on my website. In this article, I will be sharing why I decided to create this website, what type of content you can expect to find in the future, and some of my goals for improvements to this site.

Why I Started This Site

About a year ago, I decided it was time to reorient my career path. I had been working as a Software Test Engineer at Qualtrics. While I loved the company and the people, and I learned a lot in the role, I knew there wasn’t a long-term future for me in software testing. So, I decided to go back to school and carve a new path for myself.

I started that journey at Western Governors University, where I earned a master’s degree in Data Analytics. I learned a great deal during the program and, afterward, was eager to jump back into the workforce. However, as many probably know, job-searching right now can take a while. So I decided to use this time to work on some personal projects and continue learning about topics of interest.

That’s why I decided to start this website—to create a space where I can share my work more openly and showcase future projects.

How I Built the Site

To build the website, I decided to use Wagtail, a Django-based CMS that I had worked with during my time as a part-time web developer at BYU. Although I was once well-versed in Django, Wagtail, and CSS, it had been a while since I’d done any real web development. Building this site was a great opportunity to refresh those skills and continue expanding my skill set.

When I finally got the site working exactly how I wanted it, I felt a real sense of accomplishment. Then I realized I still needed to figure out how to host the site. I remembered trying to host a Django project years ago, running into so many issues that I eventually gave up, so I knew I’d likely encounter some challenges this time around, too. Fortunately, things went much smoother. I found excellent documentation and guides on setting up Django on DigitalOcean (the cloud service provider I chose), and I had ChatGPT to help troubleshoot and brainstorm when things didn’t work as expected.

To deploy the site, I used the DigitalOcean App Platform with a custom Dockerfile to connect my GitHub repository to the project. I also created a Database Cluster with a PostgreSQL database to store my production data. Finally, I had to consider how to serve static and media files: I used the WhiteNoise Python library for static files and set up a DigitalOcean Space for media files.

Website Content

One of the questions I found myself asking early on was: What type of content should I include on this site? While the primary purpose of this site is to showcase the projects I’ve worked on, I also wanted it to be more than just a portfolio. I wanted it to serve as a place to share both completed work and ongoing thoughts. A space to organize my ideas and document my learning journey.

With that in mind, I decided to include two main content sections:

My Portfolio
This page highlights finished (or at least reasonably polished) projects I’ve worked on. Each project includes a link to its source—whether that’s a Kaggle notebook, GitHub repository, or Tableau dashboard—along with a link to a blog article that explains the project in more detail.

My Blog
In addition to sharing completed projects, I wanted a place to capture pieces of my thought process and learning journey. On the blog page, you’ll find some articles that expand on the projects featured in the portfolio, while others explore unrelated discoveries or research interests. This is where I’ll share insights and reflections as I continue learning.

I also included an About page where you can learn more about me and my background, and a Contact page so you can reach out to me directly.

What I Learned

In building this site, I quickly realized I didn’t remember nearly as much about Django and Wagtail as I thought I did. Fortunately, after working through the process, I now feel like I have a solid grasp on these frameworks again and plan to keep strengthening my knowledge as I continue expanding the site.

I was also reminded of how frustrating CSS can be. Design and formatting have never been my strongest skills, so getting the site navigation spacing just right and making sure images were properly centered ended up being one of the hardest parts of the project. Initially, I tried writing all the CSS from scratch, but I eventually switched to using the Bootstrap CSS library—which turned out to be one of the best decisions I made.

Finally, in the deployment of the code I remembered how challenging setting up static files in production can be. The biggest challenge that I faced was that when DEBUG=False (as it should be in production) it was more difficult to get information about the specific errors. To circumvent this issue, I set up logging so I could capture useful information in the console.

If you made it this far, THANK YOU. I am so excited to finally launch this site and share it with you all.