November 30, 2020
When I originally created this site, I had no clue what I was doing. Some friends told me I should think about creating a personal website, and I thought it would be fun to write a few blog posts. So I threw together a few basic styles with GitHub's static site generator, broke Jekyll a few times, and eventually figured out how to get things working!
Since then, this site has served me well. It's a great place to point recruiters or job applications, and blogging has provided a nice outlet for writing more creative than what I usually do at my day job.
However, as the years have passed on, I've noticed a few weaknesses of the site:
I originally "borrowed" a lot of CSS cues from the Daring Fireball website. And by borrowed, I mean that I pretty much copied the styling because it meshed well with my minimalistic website preferences.
The name of this site is pronounced "Lambda Lovers", but I've just used the symbol for lambda at the top of the page. I don't think there's anything wrong with that personally, but I'm sure some recruiters have visited this site, read "greek symbol lovers" at the top, and decided I wasn't worth any more investigation because I have some kind of strange kinky website for lovers. (Note: this is not a kinky website for potential lovers)
Random typos and mistakes have crept up in the site's text over the years, since it tends to be difficult to maintain text when you only edit small portions every once in a long while.
As a result, I've made a few changes to the site:
While I still like "my" (well, Gruber's) old styling, I've now decided to pursue a slightly different (and undoubtedly worse) styling whose colors carry a bit more personal significance.
I've decided to rename the site to "Lambda Latitudinarians". Note that this site title does not have any connection to 17th-century Anglican clerics. My decision to alter the title is linked to the lowercase-l adjective "latitudinarian", defined as "not insisting on strict conformity to a particular doctrine or standard." I thought the word particularly fitting for my attitude in the world of computer science, where I feel I have a pretty open mind about the best way to do things, but many software developers insist on standards conformity to a point of religiousness. Obviously it's a great idea to have standards, but I feel that overzealousness about those standards blinds people to ways that the status quo can be improved.
I've fixed a number of typos and mistakes across the site, most notably the claim that I live in "New York, NY". Back in May of this year I moved to Denver, Colorado and transitioned to fully remote work. Before then, I actually lived in upstate New York for all but a couple of weeks at the beginning of 2020 due to coronavirus (despite maintaining an empty apartment in Astoria, NY -- RIP my bank account).
I'll probably tweak the site design (specifically the background color -- it's sort of aggressively green right now) more in the future, but for now, keep an eye out for future blog posts! I've got a few planned for the immediate future, mostly based around random subjects that interest me, like my experience learning Kotlin recently, the origins of the SAT exam, and some musings on podcasts, running, hiking, Colorado, Denver, and espresso. If you've enjoyed any of my ranty posts so far, send me an email at ncontino [at] u.rochester.edu -- I'd love to hear from you.