Derek Pennycuff’s Home on the Web
I’m a Tennessee native who moved my family 800 miles north, from Gallatin Tennessee to Eagle River Wisconsin, in the summer of 2011. The chain of lakes of northern Wisconsin are a popular vacation spot. One of the primary docks for getting a boat on the chain is half a block from here. I walk my dog past it daily. The local accent is somewhere between Fargo and Escanaba in da Moonlight. (The fact that comparison also works on a map is total coincidence.) My family tends to stick out a bit, but we make our own fun.
Values
I am passionate about education, and the web, and particularly about the intersection of the two. I’ve directly benefitted from public education and the generousity of the web community. I’m happy to pay that forward however I can, from working at a community college to helping organize a mobile web centered conference to serving on the board of the local charter school. It has been a great way to surround myself with people much smarter than I am.
Hobbies
I code a lot. Both for work and for fun. My paying gigs have mostly been PHP and Javascript. I’ve dabbled in Python, Java, and Racket. Currently functional programming has caught my attention. I’m also a huge fan of table top gaming: board games, card games, role playing games… the sort of stuff Wil Weaton plays on his Tabletop web series. I combined my interest in table top gaming and functional programming into a hobby project to simulate things like polyhedral dice and random tables found in such games I call Rollplayer.js.
Rollplayer.js
- Source code, mostly commented even!
- Magic 8 Ball Simulator
- Shakespearean Insult Generator
- Encounter Table
- Full demo list, but those are the interesting ones
Family
My wife, Norma, our daughter, Fiona, and our son, Gavin also have sites on this domain if you would like to get to know my family. And I really hope you do, we are kinda a package deal.