Ever since I was a child, I've been drawn to computers. However, my academic journey took a different path: I studied humanities in college, and after graduating, I served as a math teacher at a public high school in Louisville, Kentucky.
The second year of teaching coincided with the onset of the pandemic. The shift to online education increased my interactions with digital platforms like spreadsheets and Google Classroom. Confronted with the limitations of Classroom's UI1, I turned to their API and rediscovered my childhood fascination with coding via Python.
In this period, coding became more than a tool—it evolved into a passion. Further stimulated by MuseNet, I saw the potential of AI and felt the thrill of its possibilities.
Even as I nurtured my burgeoning programming skills, I continued my teaching job. After four years in education, I transitioned to a web development role at T1V. The company, primarily into hardware then, saw potential in me as a junior engineer to venture into the web.
My first assignment was building an ecommerce platform using Django.
I sought out the pertinent stakeholders including Product, Marketing and C-suite. A highlight of this learning journey was dockerizing the application and setting up an automated cloud CI and deployment process.
A little over a year later, I moved to Loops, a company specializing in cultivating and contacting audiences via email.
Recently (as of 2023), I've utilized my JavaScript skills to devise an innovative approach to chess tactics training on Lichess.org. I named it Pawn Party. This project evolved from a humble experiment in the inspector panel into a published Chrome Extension. It brings a fresh perspective to 'blindfolded' tactics training. Unlike traditional methods where all pieces are hidden and board positions are inferred solely from notation - a method I found a bit too 'sink or swim' - Pawn Party provides a more customizable learning experience. Users can selectively hide pieces and adjust the timing, fostering a more gradual and personalized learning curve. As of now, the extension has garnered 42 lifetime downloads and 7 weekly active users, illustrating its appeal to chess enthusiasts seeking new ways to train.
As a teacher, I wanted to maintain contact with each student's family. Prioritizing those families with students who hadn't recently submitted assignments or comments was essential. Unfortunately, Google Classroom didn't support sorting by last asynchronous check-in natively.↩