Hello! My name is Lara.

Three illustrated monsters peeking from the corners of the image looking at a photo of a white woman with brown hair drinking a cocktail. The photo is in a frame and the monster on the right is thinking, "Who's that?"

I’m a software developer living in Pittsburgh, PA. I work on enterprise WordPress websites and design systems at Penske Media Corporation. I’m in the midst of a career transition to computing education research.

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 (yes, CSS developers are 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 and Nepali (mostly Nepali at the moment), I create friendly monsters and occasionally create zines, and I 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.
  • Writing CSS Algorithms
    The methods for white-boarding algorithm questions serve us quite well when writing CSS algorithms. This post is a written portion of the second half of version 1 of the Algorithms of CSS.
  • 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.

Recent Posts

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

  • Two containers full of small green chili peppers
    Updates: November 6 – January 4, 2022
    Final chili harvest, PhD applications…complete!, learning Nepali, sort-of learning data science, and racial justice-related links.
  • Family Monster
    This family monster is a classic. Especially in these cold temperatures, the apparent warmth and comfort of the baby monsters is enviable.
  • On the left is a blue monster that is a metaphor for the browser. There are arrows for HTML, CSS, and JS pointing to its mouth. On the right is the same image but with an additional arrow "wasm" with an arrow poiting toward it that says "any language".
    An explainer about Rust, Web Assembly, the future, and a concern
    What is Rust and what does it have to do with the future of the web? I’ve noticed some buzz about Rust lately and wanted to write this explainer post to share my distillation of the topic.
Go To Blog

I create friendly monsters.

The monsters bring joy and smiles, and someday, they may teach programming and computer science. I draw them in sketchbooks, paint them on various materials, and create digital versions for printing as stickers and magnets, and to use in my slides for conference talks.

Collage of sketches of cute monsters

I love to give away stickers and magnets of the digital versions to people I meet at events. Since events have moved online, I started a not-for-profit online shop so that I can share the monsters more widely.

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.