blog

Today marks the second week of school. More importantly, however, is the new website update I just pushed:

Resume page is now working! Implementation was easy, but updating my resume was the (relatively) hard part. It was pretty hard to encompass the breadth of the stuff I do at the AGGRC into just a few bullet points, so I just focused on the more engineering related parts.

New background image! My extremely professional beta testing team (read: my girlfriend) let me know that white on white kind of sucks to read. Now, eagle-eyed readers may note that I did mention this in an earlier blog post. It has been done now because I completely forgot to change it. Image credits are to Orhan Pergel on Pexels.com. Now, only the top half of the website is completely white! (I also lowered the alpha channel so the frostedGlass div is more opaque.)

Edited the contact and about me boxes to be at the top of the blog channel, and renamed the whole page "blog & contact". The contact and about me boxes being sticky caused some gross-feeling scroll behavior so I just ended up making them static. I don't know how I feel about this though. It makes the blog feel kind of empty past the most recent entry? Expect revision. Also, the page was renamed because contact information is significantly more important than my about me section, which I'm debating moving to the landing page.

In addition, I've been exploring a few project ideas to liven up my website a bit.

HUD Glasses
Pretty much what it sounds like. I wear glasses, and I recently got a smart watch. I think it would be super cool (and educational) to create some sort of attachment that snaps onto my glasses and holographically projects some stuff onto them, maybe a heartbeat monitor that receives data from my watch.

Later, if it works out, I think I might be able to dabble into computer vision and adding facial recognition onto my glasses. It certainly would help with remembering peoples' names.

Related fields: Electrical engineering, computer science

Robotic Arm Gantry
This one might be a bit derivative. A while back I saw this YouTube video describing some guy that made a mechanized grabber that moved around his room on a gantry, and he made it pick up his laundry.

I was thinking I could expand on that. I might be able to make a mechanical arm with three joints that moves around on a gantry secured to my wall, using inverse kinematics to control the arm to do complex movements, although I feel like this one could get really expensive really fast.

Related fields: Robotics, electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering

Random Stuff

Lunch Today: Chicken Bacon Rancher from Panera with Srikar and Nguyen

Highlight: Hanging out with Jasmin in the library (again)

My domain is finally live! I just bought it off of porkbun, accessible at www.caseyleblanc.dev. I slapped the link on my linkedin header, so if you're coming here from that, hello!

EDIT (i took it down, the website isn't finished yet and i really don't want people who could be hiring me seeing a bunch of blank pages 😭)

Today is the third day of classes and my first day attending the lab portion of BE 2352. I finished the MATLAB tutorial in like 10 minutes (it's like a weird mishmash between LUA and Python) so now I'm writing my blog post and rewriting the design post in between classes.

One of the upcoming assignments for BE2352 is to attend at least one of several career development events, so my goal is to have the website in a presentable state before I leave for one of the career development events.

To do so, I used Google's Antigravity extension for VSCode to add the "about me" section as well as the "jump to" panel on the left. Yes, I'm a filthy vibe coder. But damn, if the three column layout doesn't look good. It also wasn't too difficult to setup. Given that it worked extremely well, I may eventually explore multi-agent usage and maybe even getting a local LLM running on my home server.

It basically rewrote about half of the blog code to have it render and dynamically add the html elements in both the jump to and the center panel, then updates them with the markdown file contents. I personally vetted all of the code that it added and changed a few things like the weird emoji spam, as well as the contact me section. Those are now SVG images and not the crab emoji. Pretty cool.

While I was at it, I also deleted the "linkedin" page and replaced it with the linkedin button in the contact me section in the bottom right. It was kind of useless and most people will find my linkedin before this website anyways.

Oh yeah, and I need to change the background. With this gigantic wall of text, I noticed that readability really takes a hit.

Also, for the first post each day, I'll try to record a few things about each day in the footer. See the first entry below.

I have no idea how to blog.

Random Stuff

Lunch Today: Ultimate Garden Steak Salad from the PFT Panera Bread

Highlight: Hanging out with Jasmin in the library

Fixed a relatively minor bug with Date formatting my blog post dates a day after the date in the markdown file. This is because the us-en locale's timezone defaults to LA (los angeles, not louisiana) time, so i had to set the .timeZone in the options list to UTC to fix.

While I was at it, I also added a fallback option for the formatDate function so that when a date is improperly formatted it will just display the raw date string from the markdown file on the blog post. Improperly dated posts also break the sorting, so maybe I'll take a look at that later.

Oh yeah, there's also a github repo now so I can work on my website on campus instead of at my PC.

Right now, I'm too tired to write a blog post but maybe i'll work on em in between BE2352 and micro

Cool

There were quite a few things I want from my website, so I guess I'll use my second ever blog post to explain them.

Appearance. I wanted to capture the sleek minimalism of iOS 26's liquid glass look, so I went with a frosted glass look by creating a transparent div that applies a blur to the part of the background image it is over. The background image is temporary, but as of right now (08/23/26) it's a snowy forest. While it does match the color palette, it impacts readability quite a bit. Later, I want to apply different images and particles using Particles.js or something to each individual page of the website.

All the text is in a font called Atkinson Hyperlegible, a font that I believe should be the standard everywhere on the web. It's designed for maximum readability and accessibility. Additionally, almost all of the big, important text is lowercase. I want my website to have a very relaxed vibe to it, which I feel helps my website stand out.

Functionality. Obviously, my website isn't finished yet, but I'm ultimately trying to make it very concise and functional. When I think of a functional website, I think of McMaster-Carr's website. Even a first time user of McMaster-Carr's site can pretty quickly locate any part they want, without extreme page loading times and bloat.
This is something that I'm trying to replicate. I want everything in my website to load fast, and I want it to be easily navigatable. In order to do this, I have all of the subpages immediately visible upon first visiting the site, with the user's eyes drawn to them as they load in one by one. For the project tabs I will add different categories going from broad to narrow to make it easier to locate all of the projects I've done.

However, pure functionality is boring. This site should be extremely easy to navigate for employers, while for those who are really interested, I want there to be a lot of small details that make the site feel refined.

That's all I have for now. Sorry for typos or strange sentence phrasing, I'm kinda cranking these blog posts out and I want at least some information out before I continue.

This is the very first blog entry. I got inspired by geaux engineering and I thought it would be nice to have a website of my own, then I realized I should include a blog because all of the cool kids have one.

I'll be trying to implement everything without using frameworks or templates, because i think it will help my web development skills

My blog implementation is based off of this reddit thread where they talked about using markdown files to populate their blog. I did much the same. My code iterates through all of my posts (based on a manually filled out json file of all of my posts), then parses the markdown file and converts it into HTML. It creates each part of the blog post container and then uses the converted markdown file as the inner content.

I don't actually know if it's scalable, but this is all a learning excercise for now.