I’m a fullstack JavaScript developer with over ten years of full-time experience. I build web apps primarily with React, React Native and Node.js. I’ve also taught web development courses at Digia and lectured at Arcada University of Applied Sciences.
In the 90s our family computer wasn’t yet connected to the Web so I played around with static HTML files and viewed them offline with a program called The Internet. A buddy of mine had already found his way online so he would share random animated GIFs that he had found and I would put them up on my homepage. Once my parents got us our first dial-up connection I was finally able to publish my work.
The hobby eventually grew into a side hustle of sorts when a friend of mine who worked as a programmer asked me if I could design some websites in Photoshop and lay them out in HTML. I was introduced to CSS and wrote a few lines of PHP, mainly to reuse markup. The idea of serving dynamic content from a database was a game-changer so I wanted to learn more about it.
It wasn’t until I got my first full-time programming job that I delved deeper into web development. I learned about modern tools and frameworks, methodologies and design patterns that felt overwhelming at first but were instrumental in directing me to become a professional web developer.