Hi,I’m Amanda.

I’m a wife, a mom, a technology leader, and a hobbyist of hobbies. Depending on the day, the order of those things probably changes.

Amanda, holding a stack of books with a succulent and lavender

A passing “huh, that’s interesting” has a way of turning into three weeks of reading, a shelf of reference books, and strong opinions about something I had never thought about before.

Some of those interests have been with me for decades. Some stay for a season. Some disappear for years and come back the moment I remember how much I loved them. Plants, books, photography, crochet, chickens, 3D printing, building software... they all get to be true at once.

Being interested in a lot of things is the most consistent thing about me.

Yarn, a crochet hook and a stack of books

One thing leads to the next

Plants are the clearest example.

I started collecting succulents because I liked how they looked. Then I wanted to know what they were called. Names led to taxonomy, taxonomy led to documenting the collection, and documenting it led to digging through years of old photographs to work out what I used to have.

Now every plant in the garden has an accession number and a photographic record, the way a botanical garden keeps them.

Other interests took me somewhere completely different. I have picked things up because they looked fun, because I wanted to make one specific object, because someone I love was already deep in it, or because I ran into something and needed to know how it worked.

Crochet came back after years away. So did photography.

An open notebook with a mind map spreading out from the word “huh…”

I tend to want to understand things

Some of the deepest dives I’ve taken have come from trying to understand my own life and the people I love.

I’ve been married, divorced, and married again. I’ve had to learn about narcissistic abuse and codependency because those words eventually gave me language for things I had lived through but didn’t fully understand at the time.

Parenting has sent me searching for answers more times than I could count. Learning that I have ADHD changed the way I understood parts of myself I’d spent years trying to explain.

When something matters to me, I want to understand it. Sometimes that means learning the taxonomy of a plant or figuring out why a 3D print keeps failing.

Sometimes the thing I’m trying to understand is myself.

An open journal beside a candle and a cup of tea

A little corner of the internet

Before MySpace and Facebook, I had a GeoCities website.

I learned HTML as a kid and built pages in Notepad and FrontPage. There was definitely a Shakira fan page in there somewhere.

Later, I had my own website for years, mostly for my photography. Social media eventually became where I shared things, and somewhere along the way I stopped maintaining a personal site.

I’ve missed having one.

There’s something I like about having my own place for all of this. It doesn’t have to fit the format of whatever platform I happen to be using, and it can change as I do.

So I made myself another little corner of the internet.

That’s just amanda.

A beige CRT monitor showing a GeoCities page, beside a floppy disk and a film camera

And lately, I build things

Technology has been part of my life since I was a kid, and it has been my career for my entire adult life.

AI has changed what I’m able to do with it.

There are a lot of things I’ve thought about over the years and dismissed because I didn’t have the particular development skills required to build them. I could understand the technology, figure out what I wanted something to do, and usually come up with ideas for how it might work. Turning that into working software was a different story.

That gap has gotten a whole lot smaller.

AI doesn’t magically make me know how to do everything. I still spend plenty of time figuring out why something broke, changing my mind about how it should work, discovering limitations I didn’t know existed, and realizing that the supposedly simple feature I want is absolutely not simple.

But now I can get much further.

Recently that has meant building software for problems that exist because of my own hobbies: a full catalogue for the plant collection, and the site you are reading.

A laptop showing the just amanda site under construction, beside a notebook of wireframes

A living archive

I think of this site as a living archive. It is where all of this lives together, and it is where I can send people when they ask.

Because they do ask.

What should I read next. How do I start crocheting. What is wrong with my jade plant. Are chickens a lot of work. Which printer should I buy. I have researched most of those questions well past the point of reasonableness, and the answers were scattered across my camera roll, my notes app, and about four years of text messages.

So: book recommendations, with reasons. The four tools you need to start crocheting and the dozen you do not. Plant identification, and what actually killed the thing. What I learned taking a 3D printer from a box my son was excited about to prints I am proud of. The flock, one bird at a time.

Some of what I have learned along the way is not a hobby at all. There is room for that here too.

A film camera resting on books, beside a notebook of plant records and an archive envelope

Some of this has been with me for decades. Some of it comes back after years away. Some of it belonged to one particular season of my life and did exactly what it needed to do.

This is where all of it lives, and where I get to share it.

Maybe you’ll find something useful while you’re here.

just amanda.