About This Website

This website has been used for various purposes in the past.

Currently, it is where I post about problems that I encounter, create, and solve while using, tweaking, breaking and even building software.

I have very recently migrated old content to this new site built with Astro, so it now performs double duty as both my personal website, and my personal playground for experimenting with new technology. My “experiments” page is a collection of short examples of how small bits of Astro work, often involving JavaScript, React, Svelte and whatever else someone mentions in the Astro Discord that I find intriguing. I am finding out as I go along! And am very active in this open source project, somehow became one of the project Maintainers, and can always be found on the Discord.

About Sarah (Contact)

In Toronto, I helped hundreds of students through high school & university as a private tutor, teacher, academic advisor, school administrator and guidance / university admissions counsellor. I used several stylus-based tablet PCs for taking/making digital math notes long before tablets were a thing. I was also an active volunteer in the Ontario homeschooling community: writing, advising, and speaking at conferences.

From our island waterfront home in Atlantic Canada, I am devoting my current attention to a “second act” in programming, actively working with front end development technologies and in particular, coding in JavaScript and React on a Chromebook entirely in the browser with no local dev environment.

This blog (by the time you’re reading it) will be my first foray into Astro, after having converted this site to Gatsby, after years of existing as a Jekyll blog … after years of existing as an Octopress blog.

Despite my best intentions of learning modern, practical development tools and tech, much of my time is still spent wrestling with more mundane issues like why my Chromebook won’t connect to the wifi at (specifically, and reproducibly) Radisson hotels. Or, I might find myself determined to daisy-chain several IFTTT triggers and actions in order for me to be able to slip something automatically into Joe’s Pocket reading list from my own account. JAMstack in the streets, App(let)s / Extensions / URL Hacking in the sheets.

I’m “all things tech” and Communications Director for the Summerside Community Choir, and also sing in the Indian River Festival Chorus. When not rehearsing, I can be found digitizing music, webmastering, emailing, tweeting and tech troubleshooting for choir members.

I enjoy photographing birds at home on our local boardwalk or in whatever nature setting I can find on the road. I regularly chronicle life and world travel via Twitter and have still never forgiven Google for shutting down Picasa, which used to house all my photo albums. Ever in search of the perfect digital photo-management system, I spend more time than any one human should testing, and inevitably breaking, several services and have still not settled on an online album sharing service.

Other personal interests include a good cappuccino, a new-to-me gin, watching Toronto Blue Jays baseball on PVR delay so we can skip commercials (no spoilers!), stylus-based gadgets (#ALLtheSamsung, plus many niche devices you’ve probably never heard of), and natural disaster movies where the rogue atmospheric physicist saves the day.

My home is currently Summerside, PEI, Canada / Epekwitk (though I will always be “from Toronto”). My actual physical location could be anywhere in the world as a constant travel companion to my loving husband Joe, with whom the epic “Oshawa vs. Brampton” battle is ongoing.