I love “about me” pages. I love writing them and I love reading them. If you ever struggle with writing your own, remember me. 😜
Parts of my personality contradict each other and I have a lot of quirks. My music taste makes it seem like I was born in the wrong decade. I’m an ex-ballerina and currently enjoy lifting weights. I hate movies. I’m a non-vegan vegan food appreciator. I do not like cake. 🤭 I often actively avoid using Google products. I’ve never had Facebook. I’d rather manually find-and-replace than run the entire command across a respository. I can sing the alphabet backwards. Both my Bachelors and Masters degrees are collectibles: you literally can’t study them anymore. 💎
I’ve kept a blog since 2002, and for years I’ve communicated with an audience through my writing. I thrive off having valuable and effective discussions via Slack messages. I believe that conversations in text are just as important as conversations in person. I write extremely detailed pull requests. Code is poetry? Nah, documentation is poetry. 🥰
I don’t love jumping on bandwagons. If I do, I jump on them really late. So basically, I am not a fan of trendy things. In fashion or in tech. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I built this site in .html files and not in React.
You can trust me to build something with best practices, without trying too many cool new things or using hacks. I believe in progressive enhancement and giving users a pleasant experience.
From wanting to be a ballerina, to a dentist, to a musician (and I did try them all), I landed in my career after building websites and blogging as a hobby. I won’t lie: I love my job, but it comes with enough challenges and differences that I don’t believe I “turned my hobby into a career”.
My biggest challenge began with flat-out refusing to learn JavaScript for as long as professionally possible, and being discouraged by comparing my slow-paced journey to that of other people’s. Rolling back like a rollercoaster failing to gain enough velocity, this continued for a long time. Now, I’ve been working with React for over two years. And I still get impostor syndrome. 🙈
As a woman of colour, I come from a marginalised group. Marginalised folks often experience exclusion and discrimination. In my professional career, my personal experience shapes the way I view my work and how I deliver it. I’m passionate about making the web accessible for everyone and letting everyone experience the joy of the web.
I care about how we can contribute to making workplaces welcoming and inclusive for everybody. I mentor people because I know how much the right opportunities and the right support helped me in my career.
It shouldn’t surprise you that I’m anti-hustle culture. Working in tech has made me feel ashamed for how we portray the lives of people in our industry. Working 9–9; sleeping under desks; 48-hour hackathons with no reprieve. My own mental health has suffered because of the toxicity in tech. As a coping mechanism, I wrote a poetry collection called the off switch is broken, inspired by my experiences.
I believe in taking on the responsibility to advocate for a healthier future for the engineers of tomorrow.