About Me

My name's Chelsea Urquhart and I've been programming in various languages for about twenty years. I'm mostly self-taught although I've spent the past year working towards my Web Technologies Associate Certificate at BCIT. I began it because I wanted a credential but I'm finding the accessibility and "best practice" standards I've been learning have been invaluable.

I enjoy web development a lot, especially on the back end although front-end designs tend to feel more rewarding when they're finished.

Projects

I'm currently working on a web interface to administer my servers. It uses OOP PHP to interact with the various servers (Apache, Nginx, BIND9, Postfix), configure them, and reload them. The front end is HTML 5 with Javascript and jQuery, and utilizes AJAX for configuration changes. It's a big project and it's just starting to come together so I'm pretty excited for that.

What I Do

I'm very flexible when it comes to coding; it has always come second nature to me. I can pick up a new API, program, or even a completely foreign programming language extremely quickly and I find new learning experiences highly gratifying.

My favorite language of all time is PHP and that's from a fair sized pool: I started learning Basic on an Apple IIE when I was about 8 and progressed forward from then onwards. I have various levels of experience including various "Basics" (Apple IIE, Commodore 64, QBasic, Visual Basic), Pascal, C/C++, C#, Perl, PHP, and ASP.

I love writing code -- it comes even easier to me than English -- and anytime a complex project presents itself, I love throwing myself into it. I am very experienced with Wordpress plugin/theme development and have a limited but expanding experience with Drupal; I'm a "learn as I go" person. That is to say that I learn best when I have a task that needs completion as opposed to just reading a manual.