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Welcome to Flerkin Two

aka Becky's Sandbox

Stop Running and let the Flerkin Eat You...

Hi - I'm Dr. Becky Andrews and this is the demo page for my "leaning to code" journey. Yeah, I know, learning to code in your 50's - in 2025 when coding jobs are going away - insanity... It has been said, it has been noted... Sometimes you just have to follow your passion. I am enjoying learning to code every bit as much as I enjoy studying medicine. They are surprisingly similar. I began my self-guided 'learn to code' adventure in March 2022 with my eye on self-building resources needed by my community and patient base. Being a holistic thinker, that has lead me down a long winding path to understand how it all works together. I've completed several self-paced bootcamps, and one "real time" bootcamp that was not very helpful. There has been much eye-rolling from various teachers when I want to take 6 month detours to learn how something really works, but I stick by my process and after 3 years it is finally yeilding results.


I do owe a big shout out to:

  1. My brother - the networking, server, security and history guru - Mike Andrews of fark.com - yes, THAT Mike Andrews
  2. My "pulling it all together" tutor Miguel Ludert
  3. Colt Steele's Fullstack Bootcamp on Udemy - his amazing teaching really helped make sense of it all
  4. Dr. Angela Yu and her Fullstack Bootcamp on Udemy - I didn't finish that camp, but having a British physician teach me basic coding was the spark that got me to believe that this was even possible

What you are seeing here is 100% hand-coded by me. That includes:

  1. Homepage - simple HTML with responsive Tailwind CSS styling
  2. CatGallery - simple HTML with Flexbox and responsive Bootstrap styling
  3. SnuffyGames - static HTML with Bootstrap and Basic Javascript
  4. ToDo and TacoStand are not yet live, they will be tiny MERN full-stack proof-of-concept projects using React, forms, and a database
  5. It is being served to you from a hand-build VM Droplet on Digital Ocean
  6. The server is running Ubuntu, Nginx, MongoDB Community edition, and connecting to Mailgun for updates and error messaging
  7. Domain is hosted at Cloudflare, making use of their security features, and TLS/SSL certificates
  8. Code is deployed from GitHub - someday automated with GitHub actions or webhooks
  9. Yes, I know there are still some style things to fix... keep yer pants on... I'm working on functionality first


Yeah, it was hard. It has taken over 3 years to learn enough to get what you are seeing in front of you and functional... but this was the lynchpin. Next I will learn to use modern 'serverless' deployment on AWS. Then... lookout

Becky's Sandbox

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Phase 256 of my Learning to Code journey... good grief it has been a long road just to get to this humble spot. This site, in addition to being unimportant and ridiculous, is a sandbox for me to test out code and projects. It is also an archive of my coding journey, hosting demo projects as I mastered? well semi-mastered each skill or concept.

OMG It's Working!

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This journey started in March 2022 - it is now clear I will be on this journey for many moons to come. It is so exciting to finally be at this point. What you are viewing was all written by me, hosted on a server I built myself. I defintely feel like little Anakin, the scrappy builder with no money, learning by trial and error (and a little help from my genius brother, a tutor or two and chatGPT)

But Why?

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Yeah, I know, learning something as dense as servers and full-stack development, on your own, in your 50's, when you are already a doctor... Insanity. Sometimes you just have to give-in to your passions. I LOVE to learn. The more complicated the better. And if there are real-world applications? OH yeah... sign me up for late nights and months or years disappearing into a fuge state. Learning to code has brought me as much joy as the study of medicine.