Sean Richard Dennis Gibson

I initially taught myself Python over two weeks in February 2022 from skimming technical documentation, PEPs, and Stack Overflow posts in addition to reading through Learn Python 3 the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code (fourth edition). By the end of about a week and a half, I had written a terminal based program with flags to control automation and process generation of a logbook for our Study Room and Program Room usage. Our Branch Manager insists on paper logs, but the old way of producing these logbooks took days of manual labor by a senior paraprofessional. She was thrilled at the automation. This initial effort was about 300 lines of code. A few months later, I revisited the project, keeping the core logic, which was robust already, and re-wrote the rudimentary STDIN interface with flags into a full textual user interface (TUI) by utilizing the then-still-new Textual library. As my proficiency increased, this and other utilities were later re-written once again, this time as a suite of fully fledged web applications as part of a single Django project, with a cohesive structure and all the benefits of the robust and sane Django framework.

I have experience in building responsive, accessible (WCAG 2.0, Level AA) websites and interfaces utilizing both the Wix platform, and more importantly, reference documentation to write implementations out by hand. I have moderate competency to read and write modern ES6+ JavaScript, and when necessary to enhance user experience, carefully tested ARIA. I have experience utilizing and writing CSS using modern features such as Grid/Flexbox, which make crafting robust and attractive web content so much easier than it used to be ten or more years ago. I prefer lean, semantic HTML that screen readers can interpret easily while making use of minimal JS libraries, and lightweight styling frameworks such as PICO.

While my daily driver is a MacBook Pro running Mac OS, a BSD/NeXTSTEP derived platform, we all use Linux every day in some fashion or another. The difference here is that I have a reasonable ability to debug systemd service files, and I have daily experience doing light sysadmin type work, etc., to configure and maintain both personal and production web servers mixing technologies such as node.js/Deno, Gunicorn, NGINX, etc.

Proficient in Windows system administration, Active Directory management, PowerShell scripting, and end-user support. Experience supporting Windows environments in library settings.