Battle Casts (after a long while)

It’s been a while since I worked on Battle Casts (the last time was last semester?). The client reached out recently and so I think the project is being picked up again. There’s not much for me to do since the site shell is ready, and the client can take over the text / image input portion. All I need to do is to create a new template page for the 3D model.

The client said they’ll get back to me with the design for this template on Monday, so I’ll be updating this then.

Longhorn Open Ed Tech GitHub Page

I’ve been working with Chris to redesign the GitHub landing page for Longhorn Open Ed Tech. Here’s how the original page looked like.

I made some some Figma mockups to draft out the changes I’d like to make. Here’s the first version.

Chris and Maddy really like it, Chris’ only main concern with this one is that the GitHub icon doesn’t read well as a link to the Project Page. He gave me some suggestions, so here are two more iterations.

Chris likes the one with the icon + text link the most (which was also my preferred one), so we went with it. The HTML and CSS are pretty simple so it didn’t take me too long to put them together. Here’s how the final site looked like locally for me. I also made the pull request so I’m just waiting for Chris to approve the merge before the changes are up live.

WP Documentation Briefing

Athena recently joined the WP Documentation team, so yesterday we had a meeting to catch her up on what we’ve been working on. Here are some screenshots of what we’ve discussed.

Athena was already able to make some great progress on the documentation, so I think we’ll finish this documentation soon! :).

Ethics Page Cascade Help Request Update

Cristina and I worked together on the Cascade Help Request for the Ethics page a while back, and we recently heard back from the client saying that she was able to implement our suggestions, which is great! The site looks really nice right now, so I’m really glad. She also followed up with a small issue of the text not aligning correctly.

I reached out to Jake for help because it seems like there wasn’t any weird padding when I view this with the Firefox. Jake was able to identify the weird padding on Chrome, which turned out to be random because the text content was centered in the cell. I have no idea why this doesn’t show up in Firefox, but adding a vertical-align:top; to the cell format helped.

I drafted out the email for the client and sent it off this morning.

My Recent Obsession with this Brahms piece!

It’s been a while since I updated something classical-music related, so I thought I’d give an update. I’ve been looping this Brahms sonata too many times, so here it is.

Brahms wrote this sonata when he is 18 years old, and at the time he was already very musically matured. This sonata, in my opinion, is very rich, dense, startling, and ever-changing. I think it could be difficult to listen to if one is not patient enough; I’ve known of this piece for quite a while now, and to be honest it’s not until now that I felt like it’s memorable. Perhaps it’s because the piece isn’t filled with beautiful, sparkling melodies, or reassuring themes, but I have to admit that its drama and its richness really grew on me. If you do listen to it (I don’t really know if anyone listens to the music I promote here on my blog haha but I post anyways because I love these pieces so much!), and decided that you don’t like it, like how I was 2 years ago, perhaps just keep in mind that maybe one day it’ll grow on you :).

Here’s my piano TA’s performance.

Prof. Di-Capua’s Website Redesign

I’ve been working with Maddy to re-design Prof. Di-Capua’s website. We ran into some blocks and limitations of WP, but I’m happy with how it turned out so far. I hope the Prof. likes the new site as well.