About the author

Photo of Cory

A Beautiful Site was founded in 2007 by Cory LaViska, a full-stack software engineer and Web Standards advocate with over 20 years of experience. You may know Cory from his work on Shoelace.style, Surreal CMS, or his open source work.

Cory holds a Master's degree in Information Technology and a Bachelor's in Computer Information Systems, both from Florida Tech. His experience creating, maintaining, marketing, and supporting a SaaS product for over 10 years speaks to his capablities as a product owner and business manager. He's also a veteran of the U.S. Army.

Open source software is something Cory has been passionate about for a long time. His most notable project is Shoelace.style, a library of web components that boasts millions of monthly CDN downloads and a vibrant community of users. Much of his spare time is dedicated to building and maintaining open source software.

Cory is currently a Principal Software Engineer at Font Awesome where his focus is turning Shoelace into a sustainable open source project. In prior roles, he's worked as a technical lead of an internal design system at Microsoft; he led the charge to establish and deliver a framework-agnostic design system for a $300M organization; he has been the lead engineer in a university-wide website redesign; he digitized an in-person orientation system for a university that saved an estimated $42K per year; he built a production tracking app that powers a complex manufacturing process for machine shops; and he has served as a consultant for numerous organizations.

Cory describes himself as a developer with an eye for design. His philosophy is that software should be simple. In fact, he is an enemy of complexity and over-engineering and believes that software should be smarter and conform to our needs, not the other way around.

As a New Hampshire native, Cory spent many years living under the Florida sun. He now resides back home in New Hampshire.

You can follow Cory on:

You can also contact him via email. If you're looking for a résumé, you can find Cory's CV here.


The website #

This website was handcrafted from scratch using a custom theme designed by Cory LaViska. The current design symbolizes Cory's ongoing quest for minimal, simple interfaces and incorporates a touch of Brutalism. The website is generated with Eleventy and deployed on Vercel. The search feature is powered by Lunr.

The website, its design and content, and the "A Beautiful Site" wordmark and logo are copyrights of A Beautiful Site, LLC.

All code samples embedded within posts are provided under the MIT license unless designated otherwise.

Code sample license

Copyright 2021 A Beautiful Site, LLC

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This license does not apply to the website, its design and content, its source code, or any other asset found on this domain.

The company #

A Beautiful Site, LLC is the legal entity that manages Cory's open source and for-profit work. It was established in Florida in October 2008 and has operated continuously since it was organized.


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