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Amanda Koster
Amanda Koster

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But do you have a portfolio?

Hello! My name is Amanda Koster. I'm a former photojournalist and visual content creator who transitioned to Software Engineering six years ago.


After three years at T-Mobile, I was laid off in December 2023 along with thousands of others. From there, I worked at my friend's AI startup for a bit and am now looking for another role. I was happy to learn more about how AI works and code in tandem with our LLMs. I recently started looking for a new role and have been asked a few times for a portfolio. Unfortunately, everything I did in the last six years is behind a firewall and cannot be seen.

However, my friend and I want to brew beer for fun. We were chatting about automation and I decided to build a temperature controller using Raspberry Pi and BrewPi. BrewPi is an open-source codebase written in Python specifically for home brewing. We are starting with a Raspberry Pi 4 to get that running. From there I will install the thermometer.

Eventually, this will live on a React Native app so we can monitor the temperature anywhere. Normally I would write this app as a PWA as to view it on any screen. Instead, I chose React Native vs. writing a Progressive Web App (PWA) to learn the latest version of React Native. I wrote a React Native app in coding school, but the framework has changed quite a bit.

A software engineering friend of mine mentioned blogging about various software projects over the last year while looking for a job, a blog that would serve as a portfolio. This seemed like a good idea, welcome to my blogfolio.

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