hello

my name is sam raker

welcome to my website

i live in queens, new york, with my wife and our dog

i've been a web developer for a little over 10 years, although i'm currently unemployed

here is my resume if you're interested

i can be found on bluesky, github, and linkedin

selected projects

• Bangla Flashcards (repo, site)

  i wanted something to help me remember Bengali vocabulary that was 100% vanilla and worked well on mobile and coud be updated from my phone's github app. it's very satisfying to be able to add and review vocab from bed.

• Spanish Flashcards (repo, site)

  lo mismo que el de arriba pero para español (con sus propios colores, de acuerdo.)

• exercises (repo, site)

  i developed a chronic pain issue that was treated in part with physical therapy and at-home exercises. the pt place had an app, but then my insurance cut me off and i needed to make do. i am not an exerciser; i am bad at remembering counts of reps and seconds of hold time so i made an app to keep track. like the flashcard apps, this one is also just enough functionality and mobile-ly editable, although it does have a build process of sorts.

• colorscheme (repo) and css-named-colors (repo)

  there was a minute where i was into css colors and color theory, probably while/after working on this very website. i wrote a rust cli tool to generate palettes of css colors, and a rust library to convert betweeen css color names and hex codes/(red, green, blue) tuples.

• clilighter (repo)

  "less js" and "fewer dependencies" are a bit of a preoccupation of mine when it comes to personal projects. clilighter is a rust cli tool that converts typescript or rust source code into a chunk of html with the code's syntactic elements swaddled in appropriately-classed <code></code> elements suitable for highlighting without any 3rd-party libraries.

• samup (repo)

  i love markup (honestly) and i love parsing and parsing-likes (yes i am a regex sicko) so i've long thought about writing my own markup parser but then i realized i could kind of cheat by getting real linear with it and got a bit lost in the state machine sauce so we're reading text and writing html armed with only 2 u8s and a stack to keep track of which tags are open. it's a WIP but i'm proud of it.

writing

• Bangla thoughts

  some thoughts i've had while learning Bengali

• "works on my machine"

  on reception and reproducibility

• REST thoughts

  i read RT Fielding's dissertation, wherein REST is debuted. i had thoughts.

• scrap your ORM

  ORMs Are Bad and You Should Stop Using Them, Seriously.