Hello!
My name is Cassandra. I am a software engineer by profession, but I spend a lot of my free time tinkering across overlapping technical and creative domains: cars, robots, photography, sewing, 3D printing, and whatever else wanders into range. If you watch TV, I joined Team Overhaul for the latest season of BattleBots in an outfit suspiciously reminiscent of 2B from Nier: Automata.
What Even Is This Site?
This site is a digital archive of my build logs, repair writeups, essays, photo galleries, and other adventures. The career page lives elsewhere; this site is the workshop.
Across these pages, you will find me creating new things, fixing existing things, and documenting whatever disasters and delights I encounter along the way. I find writing innately satisfying in its own right, because it helps me collect and organize my thoughts for future retrieval. However, I also owe much of my own progress to strangers on the internet who took the time to write down what they had learned in the hope that someone somewhere might avoid reinventing a solution to an already-solved problem. Software has by far the highest density of people who feel similarly to me on this topic, perhaps because it is a combination of “people prone to typing a lot” and “people who are curious about systems.” When I discovered programming, I instantly felt at home because I had already spent half a decade reflexively open-sourcing knowledge in communities where this attitude was significantly less common.
‘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 a 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
Assorted Metadata
I am an archetypal INTJ, for better and for worse. ;) In the OCEAN model, I am extremely high in openness and conscientiousness, low in extraversion, 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.)
Site History
- 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 twice 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. Useful knowledge is too often trapped in increasingly fragile or hard-to-find places: forum posts, Facebook groups, Discord servers, abandoned image hosts, etc. This site is intended to keep my work on the open, indexable web, where others can benefit as I once did. Ideally, it is useful. Failing that, I hope it is at least entertaining. And if you arrived here through some obscure search query, I hope you find the missing screw, setting, or bad idea you were looking for.
