And once again another semester at Cornell University has come to a close and with it the halfway point of college has come and gone for me. As I sit around at home waiting for my internship to start, I have finally found the time to make portfolio website/blog. This year was the first time I went through a recruitment cycle and while I was able to find success, I found that many companies wanted a portfolio or proof of my projects. I have been writing a design report for many of the things I have worked on to serve as documentation but I did not find it appropriate to attach multiple twenty page reports to a job application. Also, many of the electrical engineering projects I have worked on do not easily fit inside a Git repository, so I could not simply share my GitHub account on job applications. After some deliberation and a few failed attempts, I was finally able to put together this portfolio website showcasing my projects. Some of the project pages are a little bare, but I hope to populate them in the future.
I added this blog to the website for primarily two reasons. Firstly, I plan on using this blog to keep me accountable for working on my personal projects this summer. It is often quite hard to find the time and motivation to work on projects outside of school, but I hope to use this summer to get ahead on some of the things I have been planning to work on. I want to make sure that I am working on these projects by forcing myself to write a blog post once a week on my progress. While I am ok with not making considerable progress in any of my projects, I still hope to demostrate a considerable amount of effort along this front. Secondly, I want to document my work this summer to better my technical writing skills. While I do end up writing quite a lot of technical reports over the course of the year for my school projects, I am not very diligent with with writing documentation as I work on the project; I often end up rushing through a couple pages at the end of the semester to demonstate my work. I hope to break this bad habit by forcing myself to write "documentation" in the form of a blog post every week. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, this habit will stick and I will write documentation as I complete my projects.
In the spirit of this blog, I will write about the very first project I have worked on this semester: this portfolio website. In the past, I have attempted to make various websites to showcase my work and unfortunately I have never been able to finish any of them. My biggest problem in the past has been that I have found my web development skills far too lacking to express my vision for a portfolio website. When I found out that I could not make the website quite to my liking, I quickly lost interest and moved on to something else. While my respect for web developers grew, I was still empty handed when it came to making a website. Fortunately, I was able to find out about Bootstrap this semester, and I decided to give the protfolio website another crack. I was able to find three visually appealing templates: Resume, Freelancer, and Clean Blog on the Bootstrap website and I frankensteined this website from them. Surprisingly, my lack of theoretical knowledge behind web development only held me back a little bit as I put this website together. I am hosting this website using GitHub Pages because I do not want to pay money for hosting quite yet. If I become satisfied with my writing and the way the website turns out in the future, I may spring towards paying for a domain name and server space for this website.
Now that I have built this website, the only thing that awaits me is making more progress on my projects and frequently updating this blog. Wish me luck as I embark on what is hopefully a productive and fulfilling summer!