After spending years exploring the world via bike, boat, train, plane, and automobile, I experienced tremendous growth as a human and tried to learn as much as possible about sustainable agriculture. I visited and WWOOFed on various farms and gardens, participated in garden and farm apprenticeships and jobs, and was an active part of the Permaculture community in my hometown.
Unfortunately, however, the sustainable agriculture industry as a whole is highly seasonal and underfunded and thus could not sustain me, so I took up work as an administrative assistant, cab driver, server, cook, and bartender. I wasn't incredibly passionate about any of those jobs and therefore spent a lot of time contemplating and researching various career paths.
It quickly became clear that web development would not only allow me to apply my intelligence and creativity in a productive manner, but would allow me to apply a multitude of my varied interests to my career. Luckily, I found the Turing School of Software and Design, which offered an alluring vision I had never considered: a world where the people creating the software represented the diverse realm of people using it. I got really excited about their mission and worked hard to prepare & save up.
After 7 grueling months of intensive study & practice, I was hired on as a Teaching Assistant at Turing. I then worked as full-time developer building a component library for the Mineral UI design system at CA Technologies. We went through an acquisition in which the viability of that job became unclear, so I was recruited to work as a front-end developer in the same office at Rally Software (then CA Technologies' Agile Central, now a division of Broadcom Inc.), where I've led the Culture Club and Accessibility Working Group, co-organized and led an accessibility "bash" (in which I personally improved Lighthouse accessibility scores from 53 to 91) and collaborated with UX to modernize our UI which we released to GA in 6 months and migrated over 230,000 active users within a year. It's really neat that when I moved to Rally, I initially got to implement Mineral and now get to take inspiration from it when enhancing our internal component library.
I also recently won an internal hack-a-thon for implementing a tokens system and theme provider (using React hooks and context APIs) to make it fast & easy to theme the entire app and switch between modes (light & dark, compact & roomy, etc.). I thoroughly enjoyed that work and am proud that we've scheduled work to productionalize it this PI.
I'm really enthused about the things I've learned so far and can't wait to see where the path ahead will lead me.
Multi-tenancy applications that emulate the style and functionality of a large-scale website.
ictoriaFeel free to email, tweet, or message me to find out more :)