I'm a Ruby on Rails Developer who is committed to learning new tools to add to my toolbox. I am known as a creative problem solver with <strong> attention to detail and organizational skills. I value looking at the big picture and thinking outside of the {flex} box.
I enjoy creating art in various mediums, riding rollercoasters, reading historical fiction, solving logic puzzles (like Hitori and Sudoku), and playing board games (like Dominion, Settlers of Catan, and Ticket to Ride).
Background
I decided to learn web development after having a few small tastes of programming, like creating excel macros to simplify bookkeeping reports or creating custom forms in medical record software. I began learning on my own, but found myself in "tutorial hell,” doing various introductory material but not making much overall progress.
Once I joined The Odin Project (TOP) in November 2019, I finally started making the real progress I had been looking for! TOP's project-based curriculum forced me to break down each project into pseudo code, get comfortable researching, and reading documentation. In addition, I wanted to get better at reading and debugging other people's code, so I started helping students in the TOP Discord community.
I have experienced many highs and lows working through the curriculum. One of my lowest moments was in the Ruby testing section because I struggled to wrap my head around it. So I explored several other resources, hoping to gain more understanding. But everything I found covered the same introductory material or pertained to Rails.
I knew testing was important in the Ruby community, so I decided to dig deeper into each individual testing concept. Reading through the testing questions asked in the TOP Discord gave me the idea to create something that would benefit other students. Over the course of several months, I created a 16-lesson tutorial designed to better equip TOP students to test their Ruby projects. Before I submitted this tutorial to TOP's curriculum, I invited fellow students to review and contribute to it.
In June 2020, I was invited to be part of TOP's maintainer team. This team of volunteers, from all over the world, maintains TOP’s open source curriculum and Discord community. After working with this team for 6 months, I was invited to be part of their core team. This core team handles the logistical decisions and is comprised of about half of the members of the maintainer team. Joining this team of experienced developers has given me the opportunity to collaborate with others and work in a shared code base.
