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 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.

  • As of April 3, 2021
    Fraction iterations in CSS, FizzBuzz monsters, books, more math, gardening, and knee problems again.
  • Icebergs and teaching/learning programming
    Inspired by some critical knowledge about icebergs, I came across a “baby idea” for how we could teach and learn programming and programming languages.
  • Today I am 100000 years old!
    Each year, I re-learn the binary number system on my birthday.
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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.