A Little About Me
Who I am
I am a full-stack software engineer, currently based out of Venice, CA. I'm a Makersquare alumni with a B.S. in Business/Marketing from USC.
If I'm not poring over API docs or troubleshooting a deployment, you'll find me surfing near Muscle Beach, working out at Gold's Gym, or planning my next backpacking trip.
How I got here
TL;DR: Tech recruiter turned engineer with a little help from Makersquare, dedication, and a limitless supply of curiosity (and flamin' hot cheetos).
Post USC, I spent two years as a technical recruiter - sourcing talent for the top digital and interactive advertising agencies in LA and New York for two years. My first real taste of the tech industry consisted of a whirlwind of foreign languages and acronyms. I spent countless hours researching the fundamentals, responsibilities, and technical skillsets necessary for a wide variety of roles. I quickly took an interest in web development.
The conversations I had with developers were (usually) insightful, congenial, informative, and at times, fascinating. The 'open source' community blew my mind. Recruiting led me to hundreds of technical blogs, and I often found myself more interested in digesting the article piece by piece than recruiting its author. Blogs led me to Github and Stack Overflow, Quora, and MDN, and pretty soon I was spending my off hours devouring tutorials and agonizing over basic challenges.
I learned about the plethora of coding bootcamps from screening and interviewing candidates, with a keen ear towards which would be the best for me. It was quickly apparent that not all are created equal. I was thoroughly impressed with Makersquare, the highly acclaimed southern branch of the Hack Reactor Core, originating in Austin, TX. The were new in town, but I could already tell the impact they would have on the LA tech scene.
In their own words:
Makersquare is a highly-selective full-time career accelerator for software engineering. By teaching computer science fundamentals and modern JavaScript, we prepare students to join top flight engineering teams.
I challenged myself with their 100+ hour part-time course on nights and weekends, passed my second attempt at their technical interview, and resolved to leave the recruiting field forever.
A few months and over 700 hours of classroom instruction later, I emerged with the ability to turn ideas into powerful web applications using data structures, algorithms, modern JS libraries, frameworks, and databases. Technical skills aside, I benefited from the trials of pair-programming and working in small, diverse, self-directed teams. We trekked our way through the principles of computer science, perfected the finite details of database schema design, and uncovered the subtleties of various MVC architectures, all while developing the priceless skills of communication, collaboration, and compromise.
I know the path to engineering enlightenment is unending; the current state of web development is like the shifting sands of a vast digital desert. But I have never had more fun, and I have never been happier.