About Me

Professionally, I am a UX Developer, which means that I design and build applications.

My primary experience is with business applications - the kinds of tools that allow businesses to track and report on their internal activities so that they can make good decisions. I am currently employed by HCSS, a company in Sugar Land, TX that creates software for the heavy construction industry.

I am currently the team lead for an exciting new project which I don't feel that I can really talk about yet. The tech stack for this project is C# for APIs and UI back end, React for UI front end, SQL Server for data, and Azure services like service buses and function apps to handle asynchronous processing tasks.

Outside of work, I am a serial hobbyist: I love learning new things, and every few months I seem to find myself with something new to try out. My longest-running hobbies are photography, spinning (making yarn from wool or cotton fiber), weaving cloth, and gardening (flowers, not vegetables). Recently, I've also played with watercolors, basket weaving, dyeing, and card-making.

Contact Me

Your best bet is sending an email to: jill@jmenning.com.

About This Site

If you want to talk shop...

This site has existed, in one form or another, since at least 2003. It's hosted bad quotes, embarrassing fiction, photos, stories, links... Through it all, it's been a place for me to experiment and learn and share the things I cared about.

The current iteration of the site is built with PHP. The repo is public, if you feel like poking around.

I love GitHub both for it's minimum-viable IDE (in case I want to make changes when I'm away from my computer). This site is live on A2 Hosting.

Deployed with FTP Deploy Action

I switched to using the FTP Deploy Action instead of the Github pull/deploy steps in CPanel. It's the thing I most loved about 'serverless' hosting - just commit and poof deployed!

I use Cloudinary as a CDN for my photos. I highly recommend it. If you're cheap (like me) and can do without API access, they have a free tier. It lets you download images in any size you need - from thumbnails to full size - at least, up to a point (there is a file size limit). I use the Cloudinary Cookbook for that little bit of image manipulation.

Special thanks go out to:

  • Pattern Cooler: A fantastic site for finding and tweaking seamless background graphics, including the bamboo used as the background of my site right now. | URL changed - is it temporary? Here's the previous URL

  • Coolors: My favorite way to find, generate, and experiment with color palettes.