Pirst Fost

This is the personal website for Justin Epperly. I’m excited to get my sites and projects up and running, so I thought I’d do a rundown of how I got here.

I have always been interested in technology, starting with analog electronics that my father taught me. As personal computing then the internet evolved as I grew up, I was skeptical about it. It had none of the tactile certainty of woodworking or electronics.

I looked into a programming book and found nonsense nomenclature, shoddy walk-throughs replacing a manual, and weird assumptions of logic. This baroque kludge was unappealing and required constant commitment to understand the random upheavals from update to update. As I learned about (pre-WHAT-WG and HTML5 insert link to WHATWG) internet markup languages my disappointment continued. Don’t even get me started about javascript 🙁 In this era, a person had to commit their lifestyle to learning how to make machines to awesome things, not just their working time.

I still loved technology and wanted to be a part of the industry when I decided to focus on a career. I found Information and Communication Technology, specifically networking and telecommunications to be astoundingly logical, with actual manuals written to be human readable. I also began to research human/computer interaction in graduate school. Still, I knew there was a huge aspect of tech that I haven’t really explored. People who do the coolest stuff with tech program. I couldn’t stop looking around for an entry point into the programming world.

Learning about the Python programming language changed everything. Python is an interpreted language built on C, but the Python design mantra codified as PEP-20 aka “The Zen of Python” in the Python official documentation was, for me, proof that there were people who think like me in programming. It was a programming-oriented statement of the kind of usability rules I researched in my Human / Computer Interaction work.

I took a Python boot camp from PDX Code Guild (insert link) and learned about Unix-like vs Microsoft architecture. I researched things like the Mother of All Demos at Xerox Parc. I started to understand why the programming language C was designed as it was and appreciate its simplicity.

Most importantly, with the help of a great instructor I was able to learn Python and programming basics and make a full-featured Django website that uses Python to do transform an image that users submit through the website. A website that makes ASCII art from user images is exactly what I wanted to be able to do, if I wanted. I could really let my imagination go crazy and I could at least conceive of how to make it realistically happen. Later, I’d build a twitter bot from the same code.

I got a job teaching Operating Systems, Introduction to Python, and later Python Scripting for 3D Animation at various colleges around Portland. I loved teaching programming as it combined so many of my interests and skills.

Armed with this confidence and level-ed up skills, I entered the office world. There I got to apply my database skills and test my general programming knowledge. Now, the ‘back end’ of any system was an open book to me. In my mind, it’s all just variations on a theme of systems. Whether it’s nature, a circuit, or a computer program…it’s all just a flow through a system with nodes and rules. Python programming was the Rosetta Stone that allowed me to see past the kludge.

Specifically to my office job, WordPress. What a clusterfsck. It’s solid and it works, which has made it an industry standard. At my office job, I had to manage a WordPress install and I learned what I had to learn. Fortunately for me, WordPress’s newer versions are much more logical and I was able to figure out the general PHP schema. It’s still a piddly game of finding the right element to change the ‘padding’ on at times, but now I understand what’s happening around me.

I’m going to make more of everything…more Django websites, more art making web apps, more wordpress websites, more twitter bots, maybe an instagram bot?…all in good time.