thomas diving into an estonian lake thomas and friends in a field in northern ca

This is Thomas.

(The one without the shell.)

(With his gaggle of friends and admirers.)

A Jack of Several Trades

I aim to be the kind of guy your mother would love. I am insatiably curious and enjoy learning, tinkering, and novelty in all their forms. On a given day, you might find me sprucing up my community house (see below), working on carpentry projects in our garage, picking up new skills, and generally absorbing as much as I can of what San Francisco has to offer.

I identify as a reforming perfectionist. When taken with an activity or task, I have a tendency to disappear from public view for days on end whilst honing and refining my practice of said activity. This is how, for example, I came to spend the month of October in various cafes making this admittdely gorgeous website.

I am currently in search of gainful employ, after a few years at an immigration law firm and a brief stint as a freelance writer (see here). As such, the most important thing for the public to see (especially those ravishing individuals in hiring positions) is my resume. It is conveniently embedded below, for such individuals to peruse. I'm trying to get my foot in the door of the tech world, and in 5 years would love to be a skilled, reliable product manager.

The resume covers all the relevant professional stuff. For personal info and other projects, see below and try the other links on the site.

If you're on a mobile browser, you'll need to download my resume instead.

Community Living

Home for me is currently San Francisco, California. The foundation of my life there is a 30-member cooperative community house called Chateau Ubuntu, where I have lived since first coming to the city in January 2017. (The website is a bit out of date, but there is some more recent content on our Instagram.)

At first glance, this may look and sound a bit extreme, some bizarre, hippy-ish manifestation of millennial stereotypes. We have certainly been accused of such. In my experience, though, it has been the best possible way to jump-start life after college. It's not the type of place where you come home after work and watch TV. We cook, play music, and build things together, host events, take collective responsibility of our home, and generally strive to be deeply involved in each others' lives. On any given evening, you might come home to find workshops, discussion groups, concerts, parties, or at the very least, several folks sitting around our firepit. The wealth of cooperative activities makes it only natural that your housemates soon become your close friends.

Communal living may not interest everyone, but I'm convinced that its opportunities for learning are unending. It forces you to consider how you want to live, how the systems around you shape your day-to-day, how you interact with and are seen by others, to handle conflict, to appreciate the efforts and quirks of your housemates, to support and be supported. Living here has allowed me to build close personal relationships that I never otherwise would have, and enjoy profound experiences at a rate I never thought possible. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Top Right: Home on Fell Street. Middle right: Sexy roof view. Bottom right: Restaurant night crew. Left: My 5 roommates of 14 months.

Running

Before coming to San Francisco, I spent most of my life focused on competitive running. I stopped seriously training and competing in 2015, but before that it was the defining feature of my life from the 7th grade on. I met my best friends through running, competed in races around the US, came west in order to run at Stanford, and generally had a host of lovely experiences.

A few highlights along the way included:

  • Connecting with people around the country who shared a similar passion.
  • A fantastic community of supportive and down-to-earth runners in the Raleigh, NC area.
  • Getting to fully pursue my best with the support of family and friends.
  • Qualifying for the 2016 Olympic Trials by running 63:50 at the Houston Half Marathon.
  • Representing Team USA at the World Cross Country Champs in 2013.
  • Placing 2nd nationally in the 2-Mile as a Senior in HS.
  • Running the NC state record for the 5k (14:11), also as a Senior.

Now I mostly run for fun, and have found a great group of fellow runners in West Valley Track Club, a competitive club team based in SF. Most recently, I did the Burning Man 50K (see pic of dress below).

Top Left: I lost that one, 2011. Middle right: Running in Poland with a broken nose, 2013. Bottom right: Burning Man Ultra, 2018. Bottom Left: Cross Country, 2008. Top Left: US XC Champs, 2013.

About This Site

As noted above, this site exists because I wanted to practice web design. As of this writing, it only involves HTML and CSS. I wanted to get a solid foundation in those before I started adding JavaScript interactivity. That will come soon. For now, it felt important to put something moderately respectable out on the interwebs rather than wait for perfection.

I learned HTML and CSS primarily by using the developer tutorials that Mozilla Firefox publishes. They're very detailed, and place particular emphasis on development best practices. To get a sense of design, I read some articles, but mostly just looked at other sites that I liked and that I also expected would have professional designers on their payroll. Chances are, I figure, they know best.

A few features that I'm proud of are:

  • Responsive sizing and mobile-first design. It still looks sleek and doesn't overflow if you open it on a phone.
  • A footer that is fixed to the bottom of the window, and becomes visible as you scroll to the end of the main content.
  • Fade-in and fade-out animations on the various landing pages. Responsive links, too.
  • Content that is sized and presented based on design best-practices. (Or, my best attempt.) I read this book.
  • Icons that I edited/built myself. See the home icon, 'TG' on the browser tab, as well as the social media links in the footer.
  • Fixed "back to top" arrow in the bottom right corner of the screen.
  • Well-organized, intelligible, annotated code!

As I learn more (and have more stuff to share!) the site will grow.