About Me

Professionally, 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 as a senior software developer by HCSS, a company in Sugar Land, TX that creates software for the heavy civil construction industry (think: the guys building/rebuilding roads, dams, bridges, and do on).

The tech stack for this work is primarily 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. As in all such legacy projects, there are also strata of other tech from past work, including jQuery and Razor and Angular and Vue. Gotta stay on your toes!

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.

I have a dog, Maisie, that I just adore.

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, Markdown, CSS, and a smattering of javascript and Web Components. The repo is public, if you feel like poking around.

I love GitHub 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 hosting.com (formerly 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 have photos stored in a private repo (submodule fun!). There's some fun stuff in the deployment pipeline to make sure they get resized before deploying, and I have a custom web component that I wrote to add the styled borders and gallery lightbox onto plain markdown files.

For the few icons on the site, I either use emoji (so, rendered using your system or browser's emoji glyphs), or FontAwesome. I bought version 5 years ago, and it's served me well. Mostly I'm using one-off SVGs rather than the whole font.

Special thanks go out to:

For previous versions of this site, I also loved:

  • 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

AI Statement

I have started using AI (primarily Claude) to help with some of the grunt work and infrastructure improvements on this site. All the photos are mine, hand-edited in a combination of Lightroom and RawTherapee. All text on the site is mine - I don't even let the robot proof-read it. I may have hooked AI up to the wagon, but I'm still driving. It means that I am actually getting things done instead of just thinking about getting them done, because I can get the bulk work out of the way quickly and get back to the interesting bits. I find this type of assistance genuinely useful and do not believe it degrades the quality of what I'm sharing here.

I understand and acknowledge the ethical concerns about the use of models trained on unlicensed content and running in resource-hogging data centers. I can't fix what has already happened; my goal is to use what's here now in a responsible way.