Hello!

My name is Cassandra. I am a software engineer by profession, but spend a lot of my free time tinkering in cross-compatible interest domains. Recently this involves a lot of cars, robots, photography, sewing, and 3D printing. If you watch tv, I joined Team Overhaul for the latest season of Battlebots in an outfit suspiciously reminiscent of 2B from Nier Automata.

‘Engineer Without Fear’…?

The short explanation: when I was picking out a domain, I was very into 616!Iron Man (aka an “engineer”) and Netflix’s Daredevil (aka “The Man Without Fear”) had just come out.

The long explanation:

“My idea was just to remove the superhero element entirely and just to play a guy who’s willing to take a hell of beating over and over and over again. Daredevil was known as ‘The Man Without Fear’ and I just thought, ‘well, I don’t think that’s very interesting.’ I don’t think it’s very interesting to watch someone who’s incapable of feeling fear. It also removes from the palate my favorite character attribute, which is courage. If you’re not afraid you can’t exercise courage. So I thought maybe he’s a man with great fear, but despite that fear he chooses every day to attempt to do something about it, and as a consequence he is labelled “The Man Without Fear” by the people who see what he does, rather than what he feels.”
— Charlie Cox

Personality

I am an archetypal INTJ, for better and for worse. ;) In the OCEAN model, I am extremely high in openness and conscientousness, low in extroversion, and average in neuroticism and agreeableness. The people who know me best call me an “info-sponge.” One of my defining features is that I am curious about almost everything. (Arthropods, geology, haplogroups, your obscure field of work, my friend’s broken kitchen appliance, etc.)

Things Cassandra Likes

  • Colors: red and black
  • Music: Grendel, Assemblage 23, Rise Against, Essenger
  • Animanga: Code Geass, Evangelion, Ergo Proxy, Escaflowne, Gurenn Lagann, Ghost in the Shell, Madoka Magica, Nausicaa, Sousou no Frieren, pre-1996 Gundam
  • Video games: Bloodborne, Dark Souls, Dead Space, Drakengard 3, Faster Than Light, Hades, Hollow Knight, Mass Effect, Nier Replicant/Automata, Parasite Eve, Persona 3/4, Stray, The Talos Principle, Transistor, VVVVVV, Xenosaga
  • Languages: English (fluent), Japanese (mediocre), German (minimal)
  • Languages (computer): JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java
  • Cities: NYC, Seattle, Vienna
  • Driving over the speed limit in minecraft
  • Reading over the speed limit (Check out what I’ve read and suggest me a good book?)
  • Hard sci-fi (and/or cosmic horror!)

How did you make this site?

  • EWF 0.1 (2015): Bad Wordpress site. ;(
  • EWF 1.0 (2016-2024): Bad HTML/CSS/jQuery site. :D
  • EWF 2.0 (2024-present): Finally, a modern Astro.js/Tailwind setup. :)

I went a surprisingly long time without being exposed to computer programming. In 2015, I wanted to make a personal website for my various hobbies/projects. I started with Wordpress but found it…dissatisfying, so I decided to make a website from scratch - whatever that entailed. I started running into mentions of “Javascript” for things I wanted to do and things quickly snowballed from there. The 1.0 version of this site was sufficient to land my first student programming job in the physics department of my school. I took a closer look at what a Computer Science degree entailed, and found that I could 1) graduate in half the time 2) potentially make 2-3x an EE salary.

Three software engineering internships later I graduated with a BS in Computer Science from CUNY Queens College and began working at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a software engineer.

Today, I maintain this site at least partly out of love for the Web 1.0 that I grew up in. Information shouldn’t be trapped in walled off gardens run by large social media corps. The things I’ve learned I will continue to share with the world on the freely accessible and indexable web.

Riding a snail at 59th St Columbus Circle.