Summary

I graduated summa cum laude from the Honors College at the University of Houston (2014) with dual degrees in journalism and creative writing, and more recently from the Coding Bootcamp at UT with a certification in full stack web development. I'm particularly interested in mental health and education tech, and I have experience with Node, React, Express, Handlebars, MySQL, MongoDB, and Passport, along with HTML, CSS, jQuery, and just your standard, vanilla Javascript.

Bio

I did web development in junior high and high school, and I wanted to pick it back up again after realizing I wasn't passionate about the the work I was doing after finishing college.

I moved to Austin, got a support job at a tech company, realized I still was interested in web development and, beyond that, software development. So I decided to enroll in The Coding Bootcamp at UT Austin to get there as quickly as I could while still building a strong foundation. So here I am, six months later, and I can not only talk about things like servers, APIs, route handling, models, pure functions, for loops, callback hell, but I also come across these things daily when I'm coding (well, hopefully not the callback hell).

When I was in junior high, I was big on visiting entertainment fan sites for TV shows and celebrities—you know, back before social media put that power in the hands of the people themselves—and I connected with one of the webmasters of a Degrassi: The Next Generation fan site. Oh yeah, the 100% intense show about teenage angst. Well, I was fortunate to have her take me on as a sort of protege, and she taught me the foundations of web development—HTML, CSS, and a little PHP for templating purposes (who wants to write a head section and update it on every page, am I right?).

Flash forward to a year after transitioning into my first “real” job out of college, and I realized I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. So after living in Houston for 24 years, I decided to apply to a tech startup in Austin and get my foot in the door of that world. I figured I’d start in a support role and hopefully figure out where I wanted to try to go from there. It was a huge learning curve—bigger than I expected—but it also helped me realize that I was interested in software development and allowed me to re-connect with that foundation I’d built as a teenager. I toyed with the idea of attending a bootcamp throughout my first year before realizing it was the best route for me to take to prepare me to turn this interest into a career.

So here I am, six months later, a graduate of The Coding Bootcamp at UT Austin. I am passionate about the things I’ve learned—I can actually set up a full back-end server and API now with Node, Express, and MySQL or MongoDB, which blows my mind when I think about where I was in January—and I am excited to apply my knowledge where I’ll have the opportunity to and to continue building on it.