Dear Tom

It may take me a long time to get things done but just know that my lack of action on this site is not at all correlated with my appreciation of your gift. The gift of this domain and the site you made for it meant more to me than I could convey. It truly is one of the best (if not the best) gifts I have ever received. Nobody has every given me a gift that was so personalized or directed at myself and I honestly think about this site regularly. It pains me to think that I haven't put anything up here until now.

I always knew I would build a site to put on this domain but if I'm honest I didn't know where to start. I know you say that this web stuff is easy and that anyone could do it but I really do think you're selling yourself short. There is a reason they pay you the big bucks at Adobe and this shitty site should show you why. To start, I didn't even know how to get off the ground. Unlike C++ and other engineering I have done where the path is clear to me, there are SOOO many javascript frameworks and web tools that to say it's overwhelming is an understatment. I don't know what an angular is but it sounds like some fancy protractor that a drunk carpenter made and I'm not sure how that relates to websites. To give you some perspective, it took me way longer than I would like to admit to figure out how to separate these text chunks into rendered paragraphs, but I'm learning.

Like any other type of engineering problem I have tried to solve, I decided to keep it simple and start from here. I learned what a static site is and fiddled around with some style tags and here we are. I'm trying to learn new tools and expand my software engineering skills. I feel like I have been on an island of comfort for too long in C++ land and its time to learn new tools. Javascript seems cool but its gonna take me a long time to trust a language that thinks "1"==1 is true. I suppose I'm already somewhat familiar with React as thats what I do when cppreference tells me "Care should be taken when using enable_if in the type of a template non-type parameter of a namespace-scope function template" (link cause I know how to do that now). Webdev can't be that bad right? right??

Anyways, just know I love you and that our friendship means the world to me. I hope all is well with you out in San Jose and that Cameroun and the Sauce are doing well too. Can't wait for you to come visit in March for Spader and Abi's wedding

Best,
Evan

P.S. IDK what to put here but its 3am and I thought it'd be cool to have a PS thing so tada

P.P.S. I don't understand CSS but this meme from r/ProgrammerHumor seemed popular