Yo!
I am Jared Chudzinski and this is my professional developers blog.
Inspired by the likes of Jessie Frazelle and Robert Martin this blog will serve as a way for me to document my progress in the world of software development.
It is also a fun little side project seeing as I set the whole thing up myself, which was quite a pain in the ass.
When I had decided this was something I wanted to create I coded a nice little website in html and styled it with css.
Nothing too difficult and I did not want anything fancy so it was quick to do.
The difficulty began when I had to decide the best way to host my website.
I am a pretty frugal guy overall and as a college student I lack any sort of funds.
This project had to be done in the most affordable way possible.
Ironically enough the best place to get a domain name is namecheap.
I chose a .ninja address because it was cheaper and also way cool.
After owning a domain it is necessary to figure out how to get it live on the internet.
There are several websites that will host it for you, take care of the ssl certificate and provide customer service making the whole process simple and easy.
Easy does not mean cheap, however, and what kind of developer would I be if I just sat back and refused to weigh my options.
After looking around the internet I discovered a fancy website called DigitalOcean that will let you create a cloud-based droplet that can be used to host a website.
Not only is this method cheap, but it also provides a way for me to learn the process behind web hosting so it seemed like my best bet.
I initially started out with a LAMP stack with the idea being to create a wordpress site.
The LAMP stack is a ubuntu base with an apche web server and mySQL Database.
After going through the entire process, creating and nuking several droplets, and waiting 2 hours too long for a pizza I was able to access wordpress and configure my site.
It seemed like I had just about reached the finish line, but all was not well.
Apparently with wordpress you are unable to modify the website code you can only do squarespace-esque drag and drop themes.
I already had a website design in mind so wordpress was no longer an option.
I nuked that droplet did a quick google search and found out that nginx was the way forward.
This required a lot more finessing to get working properly but if you are reading this then that means I did it!
With all that out of the way here is (I can not figure out how to get contractions to show up correctly) a little bit about me.
I am a junior at Ohio University studying CS.
This website is the first solo project I have successfully completed but with it I plan to dabble in many more.
My first idea is iOS app development.
Anyway, I have interned at Hyland Software the past two summers and have had a great experience with them.
Seriously, I love that company.
I am currently a web assistant for the Russ College of Engineering, another position I greatly enjoy.
I hope to continue to grow as a Developer my asking more of myself and taking on more responsibilities at my places of work.
When I began I had to google the proper way to set up a C++ file everytime I started a new project.
Now, I feel confident in my ability to learn new concepts and in my ability to implement functions cleanly and with good runtime.
One day I will get to the stage where home-baked production applications and automating my toaster are quick and fun Sunday projects!