I'm about to age myself...
I was a MySpace kid 😬
I'm talking gifs, background images, and an autoplay song that was basically my whole personality in 3 minutes or less. Updated weekly, of course. Blasting the second somebody landed on my page. No warning. No apologies.
And if you were one of those people who actually dug into the code to make your profile look way different from everybody else's...same. We could've been good friends.
That whole era was my first real taste of building something on a screen that other people could actually experience. I didn't have a name for what that feeling was. I just knew I loved it.
The Moment That Started Everything
In high school, I joined FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America), competed in a website design competition, and placed second.
Not first...Second.
And I'm telling you, it did not matter. What I remember is seeing what I built just sitting there, being looked at, judged on its own. I made that. From scratch. It existed because I made it exist.
Something about that got into my system and...honestly never left.
It Was Not Always Pretty
The path from the "girl who placed 2nd in a high school web competition" to Senior Software Engineer is not a highlight reel. There was a lot of imposter syndrome. Codebases I opened and immediately wanted to close. Things I Googled that I probably should have already known. Deployments failing because of the dumbest mistakes.
There were moments I genuinely wondered if I actually belonged in this field.
I'm still learning. Still figuring things out. Anybody who tells you that part stops at some point is either lying or not pushing themselves hard enough.
Stumbling doesn't mean you're in the wrong place. It just means you're actually doing the work.
What 17 Years In Actually Looks Like
I spent 16 of those years at The Weather Company building products that tens of millions of people used every single day. That changes how you think about what you're doing.
You stop treating code like a checklist and start treating it like something that actually matters. Because it does. When that many people are depending on what you build to work, performance is not optional. Accessibility is not a bonus feature. You're not writing code in a vacuum. You're writing it for real people with real devices and real lives.
And the tech never stops moving. You never stop learning. From HTML tables to Flexbox to Grid. From vanilla JS to jQuery to Angular to React. From spaghetti code and "just get it working" to TypeScript and component libraries and design systems that have to hold up at scale. I've had to learn and relearn and sometimes straight up unlearn things more times than I can count.
I genuinely love that about this job. Most days.
Why I'm Still Here
Because I still love it. Even on the days I absolutely don't (if that makes sense).
I get to be logical and creative at the same time. I get to write something clean and structured that also looks good and feels good to use, and sometimes even design things too. Those two sides don’t always get to coexist, and I like that this work lets them.
Over time, I realized that “looks good and feels good to use” has to include everyone. Something isn’t really done if only some people can use it. That’s why accessibility matters so much to me now.
Every project still teaches me something. Different problems every time, different challenges, something new to figure out.
And that girl who spent way too long perfecting her MySpace layout before she even knew what CSS was...
She still shows up every time a component renders exactly like the mockup. Every time the console comes back clean. Every time something she built just works. Every time she gets a "LGTM" on a PR.
Getting second place at a high school competition started all of this.
I'll take it.
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