Small Dog Legs

Welcome to Small Dog Legs. Originally intended for dog stuff, this website has evolved into more than just dogs with short legs but people with short legs too. At a whopping 5' tall, Shelby has created and automated some of her weekly mental responsibilities.

If you are on this website, you are either my mother or a potential employer. I am excited for you to click around but if you want to know some back end information about this page, here is the story of creating it.

The Birth and Anatomy of This Site

Years ago, Shelby began using Hostgator to get a familiarity with front end development. Her efforts were static for a while until recently, when she left her previous position at LiveView Technologies. She needed a confidence boost in her abilities as a developer so she decided to repurpose her old website and make it into something she can be proud of. She hopes that this page will give you the information you need to feel confident that she is the right person for the job and she would be a pleasant member of the team.
She started off with using her hostgator account to build some static components. She knew the basics of website building and how things talk to each other but some of it she had never personally done due to her changing positions regularly and a robust amount of peer programming. As she played with her domain, thinking of what to build, she decided she wanted to better practice her skills with git, so she decided to make a git repo on github using her old GitHub account. If you want to see it, please see GitHub:SmallDogLegs.
Before finishing setting up her repo, she knew she wanted it to be CI/CD so she looked up how to implement automatic deployments on github and have them sent directly to the cpanel location on her hostgator account. She connected it to hostgator and BOOM, like a strike of lightning, she was agile.
She continued her work on her website using only Javascript, HTML, and CSS until she began getting bored with her access to data. She didn't want to write out a bunch of json files for the things she was implementing so she decided she wanted to add some Python into the mix. She spent a couple days trying to find a way to use her hostgator account with Python but was struggling to find the features required to use that capability. She reached out to Hostgator and they told her the same thing the websites were saying. She felt certain that she needed to be on a larger plan but she didn't want to be on a larger plan. She couldn't ask her husband to spend more money on something so trivial.
She pulled out some Raspberry Pis and began setting up a server for her website. She spent a little bit of time learning flask so she could put an API on it the moment she was ready. Once she had her api running on her local machine, she began really thinking about what she was creating. She didn't like it. It was hardware and software that she didn't have time to maintain. It made her feel icky and vulnerable. She missed her AWS environments that were already secure with the appropriate accesses.
Feeling Defeated, she reached out to an old coworker who she trusted would help her out if she was in a bind. He was kind enough to do so despite having no reason to help her. He told her he didn't know anything about using hostgator for python and she should use fly.io. This was validating for her because she knew she was spinning her wheels on hostgator. It wasn't her fault she couldn't do something she didn't have access to.
She opened up a tutorial for fly.io and ran through it like butter. She knew she could get something working on this new service. All it took was a bit of docker. After some tweaking of the tutorial app and refreshing her docker skills, she came out with a fully functioning API. Some Data Entry and finagling of the layout later, she had the Recipe Page.

======= =======