Lara Schenck | Lover of CSS and WordPress, maker of monsters

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 draw monsters and occasionally create zines.

I write about personal and tech-related topics.

And at this point, I am getting close to 10 years of content! Here are some recent posts.

A (recursive!) function present Lara is proud ofJanuary 9, 2021
Having fun with recursion, pattern matching, and logical equivalence.
As of January 3, 2020January 3, 2021
Writing, deciding what to read, runner’s knee, learning cool things, did a fun hardware project.
My 2020 in bullet points, music, and pictures (previously 2020: Year in Review)December 31, 2020
Another year, another “Year in Review” but this time, in a more fitting format.
Idea: Desugared Design SystemsDecember 19, 2020
I learned about the concept of desugaring from a lecture on programming languages, and I wonder how that would apply to design systems.
TED Talk recommendation: How to Read a Book a Day by Jordan HarryDecember 2, 2020
There’s nothing quite like a great TED talk…and this is a great TED talk!
Note to future Lara: Probably don’t rename directories just because it “feels better”November 23, 2020
Lesson learned: Changing existing names with “better” new names is not necessarily a good idea because there will always be “better” new names.
Let’s play: “Where is this CSS coming from?”November 17, 2020
It’s a 1+ player game that can last from 1 hour to, um, much longer!
As of November 11, 2020November 11, 2020
Back from travel and resetting.
As of October 16, 2020October 16, 2020
Cross country road trip coming up, and updating the AMP plugin.

Go To Blog

More soon!

My website is forever in progress. I’m thinking I’ll add a section with some more pictures here, or perhaps snippets of the other pages on my site…like the monsters, in particular!