A little bit about me

#beginners #devjournal #writing

Hello :)

My name is Anya and I'm currently living in the upstate New York area. Meeting me for the first time, you'd think I'm quiet and shy. And, at least initially, that's true. However, once I get comfortable with someone (which can take a while--admittedly), my true nature is revealed and you'll be begging me to stop running my motor mouth.

I've always been very curious and driven to learn and try new things. While I can get distracted by details, I'm largely a big picture person and like to have a "ground, up" understanding of concepts.

Growing up, my family moved quite a bit, exposing me to a diverse array of people and cultures. We started out in the northeast, but I've lived in the sandy desert of New Mexico and the steamy beaches of the Dominican Republic.

Living in so many places, I also picked up a few different languages--the strongest of which are Haitian Creole and Spanish. I can also understand written French pretty well, but I haven't practiced speaking it in a long while.

In my free time, I'm more than likely:

crocheting
training for a 5k
reading articles on nutrition or psychology
watching Chicago Fire/PD/Med on Hulu (in that order)
attempting to play bass (not well, sadly)

My interest in programming was sparked early in my life. When I was little, my father bought my sister and I a computer game that involved hacking through a company’s computer system and piecing together evidence of corruption and corporate espionage. Later, he bought us a Raspberry Pi computer and helped us install an Ubuntu operating system.

This led me to sign up for an introductory web development course in high school, wherein I learned the fundamentals of HTML and CSS. My final project was a website that displayed summaries and links to my favorite book series. I remember tinkering with a dropper tool and free graphics-editing software to get just the right gradient for the website’s background.

By the time I graduated high school, I had finished a decent percentage of freeCodeCamp’s front-end development curriculum. Hence, it was an easy decision to make web development my career. I applied for Flatiron School’s software engineering program soon after graduation.

During my time at Flatiron School, I developed skills in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, React.js, and Redux.js through a series of project-based modules. Debugging was often my favorite aspect of completing the portfolio project. I would get stuck on a seemingly impossible bug and spend hours (even days) scouring the internet for answers. At last, I would find it–a blog post, a pull request on Github, a reply to a Stack Overflow question, or some example code in the documentation–that helped me understand the problem and craft a solution.

Currently, I am working on building a solid foundation in computer science fundamentals by studying data structures and algorithms. I am also expanding and strengthening my project portfolio in order to better showcase my skills and to gain experience in user-interface design and front-end technologies, like Node.js. Eventually, I want to learn Swift and get into developing iOS applications.

Feel free to connect with me through the comments or on LinkedIn if you want to share your latest projects, 5k training plans, book recs, or anything in between.