About Me

Welcome to my portfolio! My name is Sarah Vessels, and I’m currently pursuing my Master’s degree in computer science at the University of Kentucky. I graduated cum laude and with honors from UK in May 2009 with my B.S. in computer science.

Skills and Interests

Programs

  • Adobe Photoshop — Since 2006
  • Subversion — Since 2006
  • TortoiseSVN — Since 2008
  • Git — Since 2009
  • Vim — Since 2006
  • Visual Studio 2005 — Since 2008
  • Visual Studio 2008 Team System — Since 2009
  • Dreamweaver — Since 2005
  • The GIMP — Since 2000
  • ArtRage — Since 2009

Languages

  • C# — Since 2009
  • Ruby — Since 2006
  • (X)HTML — Since 1999
  • CSS — Since 2000
  • SQL
    • MySQL — Since 2002
    • Oracle — Since 2009
  • Javascript — Since 2005
  • PHP — Since 2001
  • C++ — Since 2004 (minor)
  • Perl — Since 2005 (minor)
  • XUL — Since 2008

Interests

  • Interface design, especially for web applications
  • Usability and accessibility
  • Refactoring code, good object-oriented design
  • Linux and open source software
  • Programming languages
  • Ruby on Rails

Operating Systems

  • Linux — Since 2000
    • Debian
    • Fedora Core
    • Ubuntu
    • SuSE
    • Mandrake
  • OS X — Since 2005
  • Windows 7 — Since 2009
  • Familiarity with Windows 95, 98, XP, and Vista

Hobbies

Reading
Orson Scott Card is my favorite author, and his Speaker for the Dead is my favorite novel. I also enjoy Calvin and Hobbes comics by Bill Watterson.
Web and graphics design
My personal web site and blog Three till Seven is where I do most of my experimentation with web design techniques.
Photography
Many of my photos end up on Flickr.
Programming
Ruby is my language du jour though I also enjoy C#. I like contributing to the programming community through my posts on sites like Stack Overflow, DZone Snippets, and Switch on the Code. A few of my open source projects can be found on Github.

Photos

Bioinformatics Summit 2008
This was taken at the Bioinformatics Summit 2008 at Lake Barkley State Resort Park in Cadiz, KY. My colleague Neil Moore is on the left, and that’s me on the right.
graduation May 2009
This is after graduation in May 2009.

About the Design

I created this layout using Adobe Photoshop, Komodo Edit, and Vim on my Mac using the Pepper Mint color scheme by Annie39 on ColourLovers. I tested the layout in Chrome 4, Firefox 3.5.5, and Internet Explorer 8.