Welcome to blakelein.com!

This website was designed to serve as a "portfolio" upon completing the Digital Crafts Full Stack Web Development course in September of 2022. I wanted to have a space to showcase my journey from public education to the world of technology. It would feature my professional history as well as the applications I was building in the bootcamp.

I decided to build to site on WordPress - it was the logical solution for getting a portfolio up quickly and didn't require much technical skill. While it served its purpose and looked great, I looked forward to the day that I could be more responsible for how my portfolio looked and functioned. After all, isn't that what Software Engineering is all about?

I am blessed to be able to work with an amazing team of engineers at Hope Media Group in Houston, TX. Since I have learned so much in the last year about web development, I decided to apply my new skills to my own website in my spare time.

This website is now custom-coded to resemble the original portfolio site I created in July of 2022 on WordPress. blakelein.com uses HTML (in PHP files), custom CSS, and JQuery on the front end to present a clean portfolio with smooth functionality. The back end is controlled with PHP and a MySQL database to retain data and provide me with everything from user input to custom-built error logs. This website is hosted on my own AWS Lightsail LAMP Stack instance.

Thank you for visiting!