About

About Me

My name is Sherrie Fuqua and online my username is 'hikinthru' at Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, FreeCodeCamp, StackExchange, Quora and most social and development sites that I consume or to which I contribute.

My professional background includes more than twenty years in Information Technology, including a mixture of troubleshooting, repairing, and supporting PC, Mac, and server hardware and operating systems, both physical and virtual; productivity software, and enterprise and network applications; database development and administration; and teaching and developing technical certification, Microsoft Office, and general computing courses.

My technology interests today includes Python programming, and studying Data Science and Machine Learning.

I currently live in a small town in East Texas where I am immersed in a number of different projects.

If you are interested you can view my resume here.

Why This Site At All?

This site is mostly made up of occasional articles that I write on technical topics I found interesting and researched and learned about. I post them for a few reasons: 1) the site is almost free, it costs about $12 US a year (see Hosting below), and 2) I don't think I'm that unique in all of the things I'm curious about. Jekyll, the software framework that I use to manage my site, has built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) parameters, so that folks (possibly like yourself) might find this site with a Google query on a topic for which I have gathered information and written.

The last and probably most important reason is that my sites and domains provide me with access to the workings of the Internet and the Web. I am a curious person and since creating my first public Web page in 1995 I have invested much effort to understand this crazy magic. Having accounts with domain registrars and Web and repository hosts allows a much deeper exploration than simply accessing the Internet from a browser.

Copyrights and Ownership

This site and its content were written and designed by myself. It is a simple blog using only a few technologies. Obviously HTML, but also some plain CSS, a little Bootstrap (advanced CSS for lazy people), Git, GitHub, GitHub Pages, and Jekyll. If you are interested my use of the last four are further explained below. All images on the site have one of three sources: they are mine, they are from Unsplash, or they were found on the Internet and listed for royalty free public use (often from Wikipedia).

Hosting

I own the custom domain of 'hikinthru.com' which costs $12-$15 a year (depending on running sales when I renew it, currently from GoDaddy.com). My code, the text files that create what you are reading, is stored at GitHub, an online code repository (a place to keep code that others can see and even use), and my site is hosted (the code is served for you to view it as a Web site in your browser) by GitHub Pages (a slightly separate service from the repository) for free. My GitHub Pages address is https://hikinthru.github.io/ but you will be redirected to my custom domain, https://hikinthru.com. GitHub Pages provides this redirection service also for free.

Site Mechanics (Jekyll)

My site also employs Jekyll to keep my pages up to date. Online you will find Jekyll described as a "simple, blog-aware, static site generator for personal, project, or organization sites." A static site is a Website delivered to the viewer exactly as it is stored. This is in contrast to dynamic Web pages which are generated, either on the Web server or locally, with a Web application, written for example in PHP, JavaScript, Java or Python, using typically some form of database and/or AI, to react to a user's actions. Like mine, most personal, informational and even small business Websites are static; Websites that do something for you, e.g., commerce and retail sites, financial sites, social sites, etc., require databases and some level of programming.

Jekyll, by design, allows me to make a change to the left column content, for example add or remove a link for a page, in a single file, and it is applied to all pages on which I display that column. I could do the same with a header or footer if I wished. It also allows me to write content (the blog articles) and plop them into one folder, with a properly formatted file name, and Jekyll takes care of adding it to my article list on the main page. It is enormously useful for someone who just wants to write an occasional article and not re-learn Jekyll and how to get a post up every few months.

Git

My Web and most of my programming projects use Git for version control. Git is a separate thing from GitHub which is an online repository where my code lives, and GitHub Pages which provides online hosting services for my code. Git is a small program that you install on your development computer and it provides version control for your project. Using Git means that if I make a change to a page and for example delete a paragraph without realizing it, I can go back the next day to a previous, saved version (the version saving happens automatically whenever I make something called a commit). This is obviously far more critical (and really designed for) developers working on large projects, especially if multiple developers are involved. Git was created by Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) to provide source control management for open source projects, originally the Linux kernel project.

Git also generously provides the mechanism that synchronizes the code and content that I write on my computer, and my GitHub repository online (available for you to view at https://github.com/hikinthru) where my code is saved, and in the case of this site, hosted. I do not do anything but push a series of two buttons in my code editor (one to 'commit' and one to 'push'), to 'publish' my changes or new articles. I do my programming and writing in an open-source text editor by Microsoft called VS Code (it is a branch of Atom which is essentially a free clone of Sublime Text) which intigrates synchronizing between my laptop and GitHub.

Further Information

If you would like information on any of the technologies I have used here feel free to contact me.

Updated: 4/15/2018.