Hello! My name is Lara.

Lara posing with a blue monster she painted on brown paper attached to a wall
Posing next to a hand-painted, larger than life, friendly monster.

I’m a software developer living in Pittsburgh, PA. I work on enterprise WordPress websites and design systems at Penske Media Corporation.

I love CSS, and in my conference speaking and blog writing, I advocate for CSS to be treated more formally in code-bases. I help others to both see CSS as a programming language (yes, we write algorithms in CSS!), and to see themselves as programmers.

In addition to my job, I facilitate the weekly meetings for the WordPress Core CSS focus, where we are working on a CSS audit of the WordPress admin, and an ongoing initiative to overhaul the color scheme implementation.

Apart from my work in tech, I love to run, bike and generally be outside. I’m learning Spanish, I create friendly monsters and occasionally create zines, and I love to read as much as I can.

I write about personal and tech-related topics.

And at this point, I am getting close to 10 years of content! Read more about me and my developer journey here, and keep scrolling to see popular and recent posts.

Greatest Hits

The following are a few of my most read blog posts.

  • Is CSS Turing Complete?
    I took a deep dive into this question, and the answer is: kinda, mostly, yeah! CSS + HTML + user input is Turing complete. Is it possible to remove the user input part? Then I can re-title this post to be more, ahem, declarative.
  • CSS is a Declarative, Domain-Specific Programming Language
    Over the past year, I’ve been giving a talk called The Algorithms of CSS, originally created for CSSConf EU. This post covers the first part of my presentation, and breaks down how CSS fits into the categories of programming languages.
  • What is PHP Output Buffering?
    As someone who works with WordPress on the regular, output buffering is one of those concepts that I’ve encountered in the past and, until now, never needed to understand. I hope this serves to be a relatively plain language description of what output buffering is at a high level, and will illuminate the concept for others!

Recent Posts

And here are a few recent posts. You can see what’s on my mind most recently on my Now page.

Go To Blog

I create friendly monsters.

The monsters bring joy and smiles, and I love to give them to family, friends, and people I meet at events as stickers and magnets. Since events have moved online, I started a not-for-profit online shop so that I can share the monsters more widely.

Each monster costs $1 to cover printing and credit card fees, and shipping is a flat fee for an envelope and stamp ($.65 for US, $1.30 for non-US). I send them out around once per month.

Below are a few monsters currently available. I’d love to send one to you, or on behalf of you to one of your loved ones!

Thanks for reading!

Really, I put a lot of effort into my website, and it is forever in-progress. I work on it with the hope that others will read my content and find something interesting, inspiring, or worthy of a smile.