I’ve been unemployed for several months, and I’m not enjoying it. As a “full stack” software engineer, and an old one at that, one of the biggest hurdles to getting through the job interview game is keeping specific technical skills up to date. I was at my last job for eight years, so there are many things I never got to touch. That’s working against me.
I want to change that. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, however. Reading a book or taking a course is not enough to say, “Sure, I know that language,” any more than it would be true for Italian or Icelandic. You have to use what you’re learning, internalize (grok!) it, and be able to speak confidently that you know what you’re talking about.
With that in mind, I will use the site as a canvas for learning projects. While I could create a new site for this, I’ve already got the domain, the hosting, and the traffic here, so I might as well use it. It also goes toward that “not in a vacuum” thing. I can add features here that are useful and not just another to-do list manager.
Presenting My React + TailwindCSS Shakespeare Browser
Several months ago, with the help of generative AI, I put together some resource pages on the site offering basic summaries of the plays and individual characters. It was an exercise in SEO (search engine optimization). To put it bluntly, if I built it, would they come? Yes, those pages are hit thousands of times each month. But that project was also a cobble-together job, very static and hard to maintain. I always knew I wanted to rewrite it.
Now I have. The specific technology I wanted to practice is known as React and TailwindCSS, for the curious (with some Vite thrown in). Instead of having hundreds of static pages, only a few dynamically generated ones power all of the content. This allows me to create a better user experience that I can easily maintain. When I update the content, I need to push a single file. When I want to touch up the visual design, I can do it consistently across all the pages.
How You Can Help
- If you find any broken links, please let me know; since this is a small React app running side-by-side with WordPress, I had to do some fancy rewriting trickery behind the scenes, and it may not always be perfect.
- I admit that this was built using gen AI, and we know AI tends to hallucinate. I’ve been steadily going through the more egregious issues and fixing the content by hand, but there are hundreds of entries to look at, so the more eyeballs we can put on the problem, the better. These hallucinations sometimes include making up characters that may not even exist. Be warned.
- Quality Control Play titles should appear different than character names — Hamlet vs Hamlet, for example. HTML or other formatting that doesn’t look quite right. Fair warning I’m no visual designer, I just don’t have the eye for it. If you’ve got ideas for making it look more beautiful, too, starting with color, maybe? I’m happy to take them.
- New Features What can we add to this? It originally started as a full browser of the entire play text (which still exists in the static pages), but moving that whole thing to React is a much bigger job I’m continuing to work on behind the scenes. What else? How can we make these pages the most useful for all those Google users finding their way to them?
- Hire Me? This part’s obligatory — if you know any place hiring full-stack developers, particularly those experienced in Ruby on Rails (and now React and TailwindCSS!), please, by all means, send my name along. Beggars can’t be choosers in this market. I’ll take every lead that comes my way.
Thanks For Everything
Like so many of my projects, this is a work in progress, so please don’t be too hard on the effort. I’ve got so many irons in the fire these days that it’s hard to keep my attention focused long enough to stick to a single project as long as I want. I should probably also be doing things in Python, Go and Rails, too. I appreciate having this platform to work on what I can when I can and the continued help and support of all my readers. Thank you.