Welcome to NQ9Z.org!

Hey all, I'm Skylar. This is my personal site intended primarily for logging project completion, maintaining a digital repository of any pdfs or references for my use, information and articles I want to share with others, and really anything else that helps justify the yearly cost of camping on this domain.

I'm a Civil Engineering student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison College of Engineering, where I also enjoy the distinct pleasure of serving as President of the Badger Amateur Radio Society (W9YT) on campus. If the site name wasn't a give away, amateur radio is a big passion of mine, occupying a lot of my freetime (and not-so-free-time that should probably be spent on other things). Outside of amateur radio, I enjoy playing with technology (homelabs, electronics labs, random programming projects, etc), sailing, and surveying. Professionally, I handle systems administration and project management at a heavy civil company.

Design Philosophy

I'm not delusional enough to believe anyone regularly visits this site, let alone is here enough to notice a change, but I need to fluff out this landing page, so here's the guiding principles behind the construction of this webiste:

• Avoid Javascript AT ALL COSTS.
• Maintain relatively simple code that requires less time to manage than would a static site generator.
• Produce a visually appealing, but minimalist, website that makes ample use of empty space, minimal use of colors and graphics, and focuses on content.

I have something of a bone to pick with the skyrocketting of memory demands for modern webapps - hence the Javascript aversion - and I frankly just like the sleakness of pure HTML/CSS designs, preferably less animations. It's kinda nostalgic for me, and reminds me of old really niche speciality infomration websites (hello srsmc.org???).

Static site generators, for their part, are not bad. But I've always gotten extremely annoyed trying to do something simple, and spending hours trying to troubleshoot (I'm looking at you, Hugo Blowfish). This is partially my fault - I really like menus and *some* normal traditional pages and landings on websites, whereas most SSGs are built around pure blogging. This is also partially my fault, since I have a bad habit of parsing over documentation quickly. All the same, if I have to sit in VSCode for some amount of time editing .toml files, I think I would rather just have the satisfaction of writing from scratch.

The visual inspiration for this website was basically just a text user interface (TUI) vibe. I like terminals, I enjoy headless servers, I'm pretty head-over-heals for monotype fonts...so hey, why not style the site after this. Like I said before, the more static and simple, the better in my honest opinion...sticking with a high contrast, terminal-ish site seemed like a cool, unique way of accomplishing this. This probably isn't idea for screenreaders and accessability though...sorry.