About
The first computer I took apart was my Dell Dimension 8200, in high school. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I bought a set of parts built to ATX, the standard size for desktop PC components, and figured I’d learn as I went. None of it fit: Dell hadn’t built the case to the ATX standard, and I had to go back to TigerDirect for a new one. I’ve been learning that way ever since.
Before Code
After high school, I spent a year studying music at Waubonsee Community College, then worked full-time as a media specialist at Best Buy from 2007 to 2009 before transferring to Western Illinois University.
Retail taught me a little about a lot of things: enough to know what to look up, when to look it up, and how to find the rest on my own.
At Western Illinois, I earned a Bachelor of Music in Composition and Theory, then stayed on for a Master of Music in Composition.
I play music, write it, listen to it, and go to shows and concerts. The song that made me want to compose was Nobuo Uematsu’s “Aerith’s Theme.” In Final Fantasy VII, there’s a moment when the boss-battle music should start, and Aerith’s Theme plays instead. I’d been playing music for years by then, but that choice made me want to write it too. I kept wondering why more games didn’t take that kind of care.
Music also taught me how to fail. You try a passage, miss it, try again, and miss it differently, until one day you don’t. That habit is most of what I bring to code: it’s why picking up a new tool or working through unfamiliar documentation doesn’t scare me.
After graduating, I moved to a small town and worked the front desk at a Country Inn & Suites from 2016 to 2018. That meant check-ins and check-outs, supervising the other staff when no manager was on site, and seventy-five rooms’ worth of laundry.
Finding Code
I became a developer so I could stay put. I was living in a town of fewer than 4,000 people, and I wanted work that would pay the bills without making me move. I signed up for the coding bootcamp at Northwestern with that plan in mind, commuting four hours each way at the start, and then I fell in love with the problem solving.
My final project is still one of the things I’m proudest of. With my group, I gathered data on farmers’ markets that accepted SNAP, WIC, or WIC Cash benefits. SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and WIC is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. We cleaned the data up and put it in a database, then built a React site that showed the markets on a Google Map, with a ZIP code search that zoomed in on the ones closest to you.
Bootcamp also showed me how many developers didn’t start out as developers. I’ve met people from all kinds of fields who are now very successful at this job. You don’t need a computer science degree to become a software engineer. You need to love building software.
After finishing the bootcamp, I stayed on as a teaching assistant. Today I’m a senior lead software engineer at a financial institution.
Building for People
I’ve had a stroke, and I have a thin macula. People I care about live with epilepsy and autism. When I make a website accessible, I’m building it for them, and for the people everyone else cares about. Cognitive disabilities and macular degeneration matter to me most.
Why I Write
I started this site to grow as an engineer and to build a professional presence. I learned a lot from people who write about their work in public, first Wes Bos, then Kent C. Dodds, Gergely Orosz, and Addy Osmani.