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I refer to myself as a UI engineer. I am a front-end developer who focuses on delivering user interfaces and working with designers to find reusable patterns and nimble solutions. I used to work as a "designer" but design is best executed and worked out versus dictating pictures of UIs for others to work out. I mainly work with JavaScript these days. 🛠

Before I dropped out of a large Evangelical university, I studied writing, biblical history, graphic design and I majored in being incredibly good at missing chapel services. ⛪️

Vim

I've been using Vim on and off for the past 3 years. I'm in an on state right now. I love the lightweight nature of it and keeping myself mostly in the terminal. I switched back to Vim 8 and been finding it really fast and performant than previous versions. This time around I'm using fewer and fewer plugins Surround, Ale, GitGutter, FZF are mostly it other than syntax highlighters. Right now, I'm sticking with Base16 Ocean for color. Oh goodness, this could quickly evolve into it's own blog post.

Side note: It is always a delight when I find a site that uses vim key-bindings.

Twitter

I have a love / hate relationship with Twitter. I've given a lot of my life to Twitter, met loads of cool people and gotten to even marry one of them. I depend on it for updates to projects like React and news and have discussions. But the direction of the platform losing a lot of it's real-time nature, inconsistent feature set and most importantly it's inability to deal with harassment, while fostering a safe space for Neo-nazis, is not encouraging to it's long-time user base.

I am super approachable on Twitter, I have open DMs and I usually respond to mentions. Come say hi! @charlespeters

Writing

Most of the writing you'll find here is not for marketing or to drive clicks, it's for me, it's a space to process things in small increments and to solicit feedback from anyone who is kind enough to offer me their attention for any length of time. Topically, I deal mostly with writing code, working in teams, building user interfaces and React.js. ✍️

Bisexual

I'm openly bisexual. But don't worry, I'm not dangerous, I just make a lot of puns. I think now more than ever it's important to be out. Bi-erasure and bi-invisibility is a real vice, and people need to understand bi folks are real, bi men exist, bi people are still bisexual when they're in a committed relationship. And I thank God that they formed me like this.

I use the terms queer and bi almost synonymously. They semantically mean different things, queer encompassing more than just one particular identity and bi being a more targeted appellation. Bi is most definitely queer though. 💖💜💙

Things I Like

• Sriracha 🌶
• Vim
• Bad Detective Novels 📚
• The Sopranos 📺
• Lemon Flavored things 🍋
• Mechanical Keyboards ⌨️
• Typography
• Profanity 🤬

Things I Do Not Like

• Diet Pepsi
• Angular.js
• Small Talk
• Cilantro
• Boxer Briefs
• 13 Reasons Why

Um, Explain the Dead Emoji Avatar

I wanted to mess around with more SVG and gradients so I needed something to do the tinkering on. I drew like 7 or 8 of them in one sitting in Sketch. After the President was elected, I put it as my avatar pretty much everywhere. It was the mood I was in at the time and it kinda stuck. I am not a ghost or a zombie or an apparition. I promise, I am very real.