Introduction

Somehow I feel the need to write an introduction any time I start a new website. Ironically that actually happens a fair number of times ....

Hi !

I'm Alexandra, I'm a senior software engineer and it took me entirely too long to build this website.

This website uses the drogon framework, which is an extremely fast web framework (arguably the fastest, which is why I chose it). The source code is here. I really like the framework despite (because ?) the lack of scaffolding to automate creating new pages, models, or controllers.

I've learned C++ over 20 years ago now and I've always really liked the language. There are a few minor annoyances, like how the static keyword does two different things depending on if it's used in header or code files, Also lambdas are clunky and all of "asynchronous C++" seems very complicated. I honestly prefer JavaScript's callback hell to pretty much any asynchronous code in C++ (or Java for that matter). I would greatly prefer message passing style concurrency, but considering all the available programming languages I'm not going to get my hopes up.

On the other hand apparently Rust is faster than C++ so for reasons that I don't quite understand myself I assume I'll switch soon....

The other (well, actually very much related) thing I'm currently very passionate about is keyboards. My wife and I have just started a YouTube channel about mechanical keyboards and obviously, since I'm typing quite a bit for job related reasons, my personal selfish quest is to find the best keyboard for me. At which point obviously the channel just ends because people enthusiastic about mechanical keyboards famously always quit buying them when they find something that works for them.