Welcome to the new www.DavidABeeler.com!

I have been meaning to update this website and expand its capability to be more useful and meaningful. From 2019-2023, the website was built with GatsbyJS and hosted on Netlify. Interestingly enough, Netlify acquired GatsbyJS to "accelerate adoption of composable web architecture," which continues the (positive) march towards microservices. Typically, behemoth architectures are undesirable; due to the extreme interconnectivity of all pieces, they are harder to develop, enhance, and maintain.

Towards the end of 2022, I started working on a portfolio website for my niece, who is graduating from high school this year and moving towards that next stage of life. As they say, "use it or lose it" and I lost my familiarity with Gatsby. I started looking for alternative static site generators and, ideally, something easy to pick back up again.

As an "Emerging Technologies Specialist" with the University of Dayton Libraries, I have been working more with PHP and Django (Python). Python has popped in and out of my life, and I have always enjoyed working with it. I have used Python for basic scripting, machine learning, computer vision, and game development, but before this past year, I had not used it for web development. There are a few Python static site generators, one of which is Pelican. It is consistently maintained, and the templating engine, Jinja, is common with Django, which is convenient for my syntax memory when switching from work to personal projects.

Long story short (too late), I selected Pelican as my new static site generation tool, learned the ins and outs while developing the portfolio site for my niece and expanded on that education again to build this site.

What is the intent of this site, you may ask? Stuff!

If you know me well, you have probably learned that I have various interests, and my career and education also show this. I do not have a specific focus for the portfolio or posts. Literally, anything might show up. I have added woodworking, cosplay/fandom, software development, modeling, and game development as starters. More facets of my curiosities will show up. Maybe eventually, everything will start to merge.

Thank you for reading and stopping by!