My name is Kimiko Farmer and I am currently a sophomore at the University of Washington. I am intending to major in Informatics with an HCI concentration and minor in Mathematics. Outside of school, I am on the executive board for the sorority I am a member of, watch Netflix, and relax. As for a future career, I am planning on becoming a User Experience Designer in the Seattle area. Majoring in Informatics will give me the opportunity to learn about how humans interact with technology and discover ways to design technology to enchance human experience. Being a woman interested in technology, I am taking this course to further my knowledge on issues I may face in a patriarchal society along with how to combat such issues. I feel that it is important to understand more than just the technical skills of a career.
For my website, I decided to pick Neocities as my platform because it allows for full HTML and CSS editting, which is a skill I want to continue to develop. I have not used this site before, but it gives me the full control that I was looking for. Coming into this class, I understand HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, PHP, and some Java. When it comes to web development, I want to improve in the design aspect. I want to create a clear and clean website while also personalizing it in a way to show my personality. I also want to futher my learning in creating quality content to put on my webpages. I think I can achieve this by doing our assignments to the best of my ability and then use the critiques I recieve to improve my work in the future. As for improving my coding, I believe that tweaking this site throughout the quarter and researching ways to improve it will help further my skills. I am excited for this course and what I will get out of it!
UPDATE: Being near the end of the quarter and finishing up my website, there are several design choices I have made. Originally, I wanted to code my own website from scratch. I started it and it was not as aesthetically pleasing as I desired. When Antony substituted for our quiz section, he suggested that those who are hard coding use CSS templates in order to make sure the design looked presentable. I decided on this template (credited on another page) and edited the code to my liking. I wanted a clean looking website that was easy to navigate, so I achieved that with this template, which was originally a little more busy looking. In terms of web development, I believe that the main thing I learned was the popular style of web design currently, which will be useful if I ever want to get into web design. A majority of them are clean looking. Also a majority are one-pagers. I decided to go with multiple pages because of all the work that has to be on our site. As for content, I learned an amazing amount about gender and information technology. I was not aware of all the subtle biases that occur against females. For example, how some technologies are made with men in mind, or how hiring managers rather hire men. Being aware of all these issues will definitely prepare me for working in IT and hopefully I can help in promoting gender equality.