HI, I'M BRIAN

Being brain-deep in a web development project is the thing that keeps me awake at night - in a good way. I started putting my toe on this path about 20 years ago learning HTML, CSS and WordPress. I used what I learned to build WordPress web sites for myself and my friends, learning new little things as needed. WordPress was my primary driver for years but it has been in the last 6+ years that I have taken the deep dive into web development. I have since made a study of modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In the beginning, I intentionally avoided JS frameworks to make sure I first understood what goes on under the hood.

The project that really got me going was the Board Game Ranking Engine. Strategy board games are another of my hobbies and I wanted a way to easily rank a list of games. I found an example of a merge sort algorithm and off I went. If you want to see my progress as a web developer look no further than the iterations on this project. It started out as a vanilla Javascript app built on top of Wordpress, but, as it sits today, it is part of the Pub Meeple website proper and is built with SvelteKit.

I have now delved into JS frameworks like React, Vue, and most recently Svelte. The last in that list really grabbed me - I loved the new take on a framework not using the virtual DOM but as a compiler. I originally used Svelte to create the Top Nine Generator app - a way to create top nine images for your board game collection - but it has migrated to SvelteKit. I then moved on to Sapper to create the web site you are viewing now - but it has since been migrated to SvelteKit as well. If you can’t tell, I think SvelteKit is amazing and have more plans to work with it in the future.

Web development is like falling down an endless rabbit hole - there is always something new to learn which is good for me since I am an avid learner.

You can find some examples of my web development work over on the Projects page.