welcome

about me

I am Charles Cole (they/them). I am currently a professional software engineer and amateur photographer living in Texas. I created this web site with Jekyll. It is built around a custom Liquid catalogue & photo gallery. The source code is available on GitHub.

This web site contains no tracking or JavaScript at all, but it does contain links to other web sites which may track visitors.

engineering

I attended Austin Coding Academy in 2018 and studied web design and full-stack JavaScript development.

After graduating I became an intern at Austin Coding Academy and built a new marketing web site. This was made using Jekyll and amp-script.

I then took a contract position at data.world and learned TypeScript, Jest, and Cypress. There I learned to develop & ship new features in a complex app to production.

I have been at ehealth since late 2019. I’ve worked on a variety of projects in React, Vue, Node, and Vanilla JS. I have migrated several projects to modern technology, including creating a new marketing site and blog in Gatsby at ehealthinsurance.com/medicare/ and rebuilding the online e-commerce platform at ehealthmedicareplans.com/v2.

See my linkedin profile for more information.

photography

One of my greatest joys is to create a new perspective and see the world in an atypical way. Cameras and other optical lenses are excellent tools for doing so. In my spare time, or whenever a good opportunity arises, I can often be found examining very small creatures and objects through a magnifying glass, a hand lens, a phone camera, a digital camera, a microscope, or some combination of the aforementioned.

Although my primary motivation is to simply enjoy superhuman abilities of perception, I also like to document and share the amazing and alien things one is able to see with optical tools. In particular, I am an avid practitioner of “spidering”, the act of seeking out and identifying spiders. But I also photograph many non-spider arthropods as well as microorganisms of all domains of life.

See my photography catalogue. Recommended subjects:

• Rotifers, microbes that slap food into their huge grinding jaws with a ring of tiny cilia.
• Green Lacewings, beautiful flying insects which, in their larval forms, carry around corpses of their prey as camouflage.
• Brilliant Jumping Spider, one of the cutest spiders with short fuzzy legs and bright coloration.

other interests

insect collecting

Of course it’s great to find an insect in the wild, moving slow enough (or not at all) to be photographed. But to have the insect on hand, viewable from any angle, through many lenses, and perhaps even mounted in a beautiful display, is another joy entirely. I practice no-kill collection only, which limits my options considerably to those rare insects which have died recently, nonviolently, and near my current location. Even so, my collection continues to grow over the years.

gardening

I always keep some plants in and around my home. I like to see how they grow and respond to their environmental conditions. But even better, of course, is that they provide habitat for other creatures. With plants, I can bring favorites such as assassin bugs and orchard orb weavers to my door.

Having lived in a variety of homes, I find plants are most effective as an arthropod habitat in an apartment. The limitation of not having a yard or nearby wild space makes well loved plants a more attractive option for local bugs. Living with a yard is thus doubly frustrating to me - not only is it a wasteful prank upon the resident, it provides abundant hiding places for my bugs as I allow it become overgrown. However, keeping plants at a freestanding home means frogs may shelter in them, so there is something to enjoy wherever you are.

reading

I read a lot of fiction (books and short stories) and nonfiction (articles, blogs, and sometimes books). I primarily enjoy science fiction and fantasy, in that order.

A few of my top recommendations in fiction are:

• Blindsight or Starfish, by Peter Watts (who also runs a pretty good blog at rifters.org)
• The Children of Húrin, by Tolkien (who wrote other books you may be more familiar with)
• Ursula K. Leguin’s series The Hainish Cycle (including her most famous work, The Left Hand of Darkness)
• Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler, which might be considered an optimistic future for humanity

games

I am also an avid and critical player of all manner of games (board, video, word, etc.), which is what originally led me to programming - a game is defined by its rules, which are just an algorithm. I’ve spent nearly as many hours analyzing, discussing, and crafting games as I have playing them.

Some of my favorite games are:

• Bloodborne (PS4) - From Software. A high-intensity action game steeped in unspeakable horror. Extremely violent and fairly difficult. However, it is beautiful and very fun; this is one of the few games I’ve reached 100% completion in, and I still continue to play today.
• Forbidden Island (board game) - Matt Leacock. While there are sequels and probably other similar games, this game is something of a classic and an excellent cooperative board game. Many people are only familiar with competitive (and often deception-based) board games which can be frustrating or even unfun; I suggest Forbidden Island or a game like it for a change of pace.
• Cities: Skylines (PC) - Colossal Order. Many of us adored SimCity growing up and were left disappointed by the downfall of the series. This game however has more than filled that niche, becoming something far more powerful, beautiful, and creative. While not the easiest game to get into, Cities: Skylines allows tremendous freedom, a strong modding community, and endless lessons on why the best traffic management is public transit.

worldbuilding

Worldbuilding is a type of creative writing which allows the exploration of almost unlimited topics in the service of creating a cohesive, believable setting (for stories or games, usually). I began by creating a setting for some of my earliest Dungeons & Dragons games in high school. But I always preferred the worldbuilding to the plot writing. And while I hardly play tabletop roleplaying games anymore, I still dabble in building settings for them. It gives me an excuse to pursue many other interests: sociology, history, materials science, political science, biology, geography, economics, astronomy, religion, linguistics, and more.