Rebecca was born in Melbourne, Florida and raised in both Memphis and Knoxville, Tennessee at various times. She attended Farragut High School outside Knoxville. While in high school, she took an interest in software development and worked part time for a transit company developing driver management and EEOC software.
Following graduation in 2000, she moved to Auburn, Alabama to attend Auburn University. While at Auburn, she was a member of the Alpha Phi Omega service organization, the College Democrats and a contributor to the university newspaper, The Plainsman. She also worked part-time, first for the University, then for a local company writing e-Learning and computer-based training software, as well as working summers for the National Park Service as a park ranger in Yellowstone National Park. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 2004.
After graduating from Auburn, Rebecca moved to Huntsville, Alabama in 2005, where she worked as a software engineer in a number of different industries, including telecommunications, online retailing and health care. She is currently a technical lead software engineer at Aledade. She also does private consulting and individual software development as well as contributing to open source projects.
Rebecca lives in Huntsville, Alabama with her wife Sarah, daughter Scarlett and far too many cats.
She has pursued an interest in science fiction and fantasy since the early 1990s. Favorite authors include Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter, Isaac Asimov, and Robert J. Sawyer, and favorite series include Star Trek and Babylon 5. Other interests include bike riding, photography, writing, making wine, listening to history podcasts, 3D printing, home automation, being a complete and hopeless Apple fangirl, and anything involving airplanes, trains and model trains. She mostly listens to jam bands, progressive rock, and 90s-2000s alternative rock.
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While the site is mostly static as befitting a read-oriented blog, Javascript is used to add fluorishes such as the site search. Search is driven by Algolia, and the same action that uploads the site to Cloudflare Pages also uploads the site to Algolia. Styling is done using SCSS, a CSS pre-processor. The styling is custom but is based on Bootstrap 5. Icons are provided by Simple Icons.
As of today, it has been 573 days since my last post to this blog. Prior to this period, the most I had ever gone without posting here was a few months, going all the way back to 2005. I have literally never gone that long without blogging in my entire life, dating all the way back to my LiveJournal and OpenDiary days. More than a year and a half has elapsed. And it would be easy for me to say that my job was taking up all of my time, but that is only a fraction of what was actually going on.
As it turns out, a lot can change in a year and a half. A whole, whole lot.
But I suppose we can start with one very obvious one.
It’s amazing how quickly time can fly when you are having fun.
Almost fifteen years ago I started working at DealNews as a Junior Developer. I was in my mid 20s, less than two years out of Auburn. I even remember it was mid November because I left my previous job on a
Wednesday, went to the Auburn-Georgia Game,
then started at DealNews the following Monday. It was just before Black Friday
even. I still even remember what that first day was like: I didn’t have SVN
access yet and I had to email my code to my boss!
To give you an idea of how long ago this was: when I was hired on at DealNews,
I announced it to my friends on my MySpace page and my LiveJournal blog.
Neither of which exist anymore.
Fifteen years is a long time in tech, where changing jobs rapidly is the
norm and staying in a position for three years can be seen as a serious
commitment to a company. But the only constant in the universe is change. Which
is why it is definitely very bittersweet for me to announce that I will be
leaving DealNews on September 16, 2022.
Rebecca was born in 
