Never having set out to work in tech or to become a developer I definitely fall in the the job chose me camp. When starting college I had initially set out for a nursing degree. Quickly coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t for me I pivoted to psychology. Set to finish my degree I was also working as an artist and illustrator but it soon became clear to me that the tech world through graphic and User Interface (UI) design, could provide the artistic outlet I was searching for while providing a steady paycheck. After graduating with my bachelors of science in psychology and cycling through a number of odd jobs including several years in the education system, disillusioned from the artist life, I launched myself into development.
Having played around with HTML and CSS while editing my Myspace page I figured that I should probably learn the fundamentals, so I went back to school and got a visual communications certificate. This is where I truly fell in love with typography and design as a whole. Although calligraphy and books had always been very interesting to me, the theory and the concepts behind how it all comes together was fascinating to me but this was for print, and I was being asked to design for web…
This is where my background in psychology comes back into play. Combining what I knew, and continue to learn about, regarding human behavior and how we learn and process information I started to see my work tilt more into user interaction and accessibility.
Accessibility was never once mentioned in all my years of education though. Not once. It was not until I was working on a government project and we were in one of those emergency all hands meetings because we were going to have to make the website my team worked on accessible that I learned that accessibility was a thing. As general panic ensued and three letter acronyms were being thrown around like confetti at a Mardi Gras parade, I googled a couple things, found the WCAG spec, and asked the simple question “What level are we being required to conform at?” At that moment I became the most knowledgeable person in the room – “The Expert”.
Thankfully this is one of those happy stories that ends well. I was paired with a wonderfully team of actual experts in accessibility, who not only helped me get the project done but also educated and mentored me. This experience was one of the defining moments in my career as it was then that I discovered a need and passion for accessibility on the web and the importance of a good mentor.
Never having forgotten how lost I was when I first started my career in tech and the immense help and support I received from the community, I started to looks for ways I could pass it on so I started teaching at a coding academy, which lead to speaking at meetups, and conferences. These in turn opened the door to publishing opportunities. In recognition for my contributions to the community I became a Google Developer Expert (GDE) in Web Technologies in 2018, a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies in 2019, and an Angular GDE in 2021.
Today, I am the CTO at Andromeda Galactic Solutions where I continue to focus on front end development specifically on user experience (UX), accessibility, and CSS regularly using Angular and Firebase, and experimenting with various static site generators.
