About
James Barberousse
I am a Traditional Latin Mass Catholic, computer programmer and web developer, and the benevolent proprietor of Dave's Malt Shop, the ultimate third-place hangout. I'm also a Luddite, caught in a complex love/hate relationship with technology and the simpler ways of the past.
In a vaguely-remembered past, I served The University of Texas at Arlington for over 12 years, creating innumerable web projects on the UTA domain and helping shape the web user experience for many students, faculty, staff, and other stakeholders of the University during my tenure.
After Arlington, we moved to Washington state to be near family and explore the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Ultimately, however, our spiritual and temporal journey brought us to the tiny town of St. Marys, Kansas where we joined the traditional Catholic community at The Immaculata and assist daily at the Latin Mass of the Ages.
As a Traditional Latin Mass Catholic, I believe and practice all that the Roman Catholic Church holds and teaches through her True Magisterium, eschewing all others. What I believe.
These days, I spend my working hours at St. Mary's Academy grappling with FACTS and making coffee (among other duties).
Website
The Atavachron is my personal website named in honor of the time machine in All Our Yesterdays. The site is used as a completely non-commercial, non-political (but opinionated) platform on which to build and test various online projects. Over time it has grown in size and complexity. Our large staff :-) curates and approves all content.
All artwork on this site is courtesy of my dear wife, Teresa, who has taken the time, out of pure charity, to provide photographs and original illustrations (since I have no measurable art skills).
Privacy
No personal information need be submitted to use this website. Cookies are used to improve the user browsing experience and to enable server-side sessions. If you are averse to the use of cookies, even though they be benign, please go somewhere else. Be safe! Read more
Blog
If you'd like to read some of my recent and not-so-recent musings, take a look at the Planet Earth Blog.
Calendar
To keep up with Catholic feast days and other, assorted dates of interest (to me), view the calendar, where, as a bonus, you can find out the day of the week for any past or future date (within range), including, for example, your birthdate!
Contact
If you'd like to say hello or send me an interesting problem, get in touch.
Website Technical Details
The website's main template is created through a home-made CMS written in PHP that builds pages using a templating system and a page-generating class. This CMS, dubbed Zephyr (a gentle breeze), like all active software projects, is under constant revision, refinement, and improvement. Part of the Zephyr ecosystem is a library of classes that are connected in as needed to handle various other pieces of functionality, such as session management, database management, form handling, weather information, XML data parsing, calendars, WordPress rest API calls, and more. The jQuery JavaScript library (despite the naysayers who maintain that jQuery is outdated — it still works!) powers the main template front-end for DOM manipulation and AJAX calls. A few jQuery plugins are used here and there.
Additional hand-rolled JS is added as needed through a custom module solution to keep the global namespace as clean as possible. The main-template CSS is also hand written as LESS code but compiled and minified prior to deployment. Pretty readable, eh? :-) Additional CSS may be included on a page-by-page basis but not compiled from LESS or minified.
Links found under the Projects tab are stand-alone, one-off applications using different combinations of tech stacks and build processes and do not use the main template.