Autodidact Extraordinaire. I am a full-stack dev with a fondness for front-end and web styling. I want to implement great user experiences in my work, work closely with both programmers and designers, and continue to practice both mentorship and learning on the job. I worked as a designer on a small React team and now I want to work as a programmer in the same environment.

I first got into coding as a form of play while homeschooling around age seven. Vexed by the strategic difficulty of Battle for Wesnoth, I taught myself to cheat at the hit open-source game by doctoring its XML-based level templates on my dad's Ubuntu computer. As I went through high school and university, I pursued graphic design, information design, and font design as my primary crafts, honing my visual skills in Adobe Suite and Glyphs.app. Writing code didn't resurface as my primary form of play until I was nineteen, during my graphic design degree, where I taught myself to wield HTML+Jekyll, and SCSS as a vehicle for my vector graphics and font portfolio. I taught myself JavaScript, React.js 16, and Emotion.js during my first job after graduating, working as a UX designer for an Agile Dev team in Portland. Since being laid off, I've attended Epicodus to round myself out as a programmer, develop familiarity with collaborative version control with git, and backend architecture, as well as practice mentorship. I also independently learned TypeScript, and JWT Auth, and Socket.io. Overall, I have been lucky to have learned most of what I know about programming in the spirit of play, curiosity, and self-motivated projects. I believe this has afforded me the chance for deep learning within and personal connection to this craft.

I am a visual artist at heart. I love making powerful and gentle experiences with smooth transitions, sanded edges, and efficient workflows. For me, programming always comes back to the user's experience and how it feels to engage with the products I make—code itself being a product: developers, its users. I love my users, and therefore It is important to me to write code that is easy to understand and is structurally beautiful, symmetrical, and purposeful. Code, like print, like front-end, is information expressed visually; to code mindfully is to be an opinionated information designer.