Rebecca was born in Melbourne, Florida and raised in both Memphis and Knoxville, Tennessee at various times. She attended Farragut High School outside Knoxville. While in high school, she took an interest in software development and worked part time for a transit company developing driver management and EEOC software.
Following graduation in 2000, she moved to Auburn, Alabama to attend Auburn University. While at Auburn, she was a member of the Alpha Phi Omega service organization, the College Democrats and a contributor to the university newspaper, The Plainsman. She also worked part-time, first for the University, then for a local company writing e-Learning and computer-based training software, as well as working summers for the National Park Service as a park ranger in Yellowstone National Park. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 2004.
After graduating from Auburn, Rebecca moved to Huntsville, Alabama in 2005, where she worked as a software engineer in a number of different industries, including telecommunications, online retailing and health care. She is currently a technical lead software engineer at Aledade. She also does private consulting and individual software development as well as contributing to open source projects.
In 2024, Rebecca relocated to Fort Collins, Colorado, where she currently lives with her wife, child, and far too many cats.
She has pursued an interest in science fiction and fantasy since the early 1990s. Favorite authors include Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter, Isaac Asimov, and Robert J. Sawyer, and favorite series include Star Trek and Babylon 5. Other interests include bike riding, photography, writing, making wine, listening to history podcasts, 3D printing, home automation, being a complete and hopeless Apple fangirl, and anything involving airplanes, trains and model trains. She mostly listens to jam bands, progressive rock, and 90s-2000s alternative rock.
This blog is built using Jekyll, a static site generator that generates HTML pages from markdown and templates. The source of the site is stored in Github, and a Github Action is fired when a new post is pushed to the repository. This action generates the site and uploads it to Cloudflare Pages, where it is served from locations around the world.
While the site is mostly static as befitting a read-oriented blog, Javascript is used to add fluorishes such as the site search. Search is driven by Algolia, and the same action that uploads the site to Cloudflare Pages also uploads the site to Algolia. Styling is done using SCSS, a CSS pre-processor. The styling is custom but is based on Bootstrap 5. Icons are provided by Simple Icons.
Names are emotional things. They mean a lot to a person, even though that person may have been given that name before they were even aware of it. We inhabit that name, making it a part of our identity.
But what happens when you need to change that name? When that name no longer fits the person you are? This is an issue faced by many, but especially those of us in the transgender community. Even if you are otherwise happy with your name, since in most languages names often have very strong gendered connotations, it is not uncommon for transgender people to want to change their name to better match their gender identity.
Here’s the process I used to change my name and markers, where possible, with the following services. A lot of this is based on my notes I made during the process. In posting this, I am hoping to help others who are changing their names know how to better navigate this byzantine process.
I haven’t put this on the blog yet. We’ve been so busy making all this happen. About all I did was update the location line. But since it’s been a few months and things are finally settling down, I can update the blog as well.
After (for me) twenty four years in Alabama, in July, we moved to Fort Collins, Colorado.
As of today, it has been 573 days since my last post to this blog. Prior to this period, the most I had ever gone without posting here was a few months, going all the way back to 2005. I have literally never gone that long without blogging in my entire life, dating all the way back to my LiveJournal and OpenDiary days. More than a year and a half has elapsed. And it would be easy for me to say that my job was taking up all of my time, but that is only a fraction of what was actually going on.
As it turns out, a lot can change in a year and a half. A whole, whole lot.
But I suppose we can start with one very obvious one.
Rebecca was born in 
