01. About me

Programming had been a hobby for years, but it wasn't until working as a Customs Auditor at UPS that I realized its potential as a career.

It was 4:30 in the international department at UPS, and the air smelled of diesel and dust. Supervisors screamed over the roaring belts as millions of dollars of goods rushed toward us. Packages piled up like debris in a mudslide as they awaited auditing.

The auditing process was slow; supervisors yelled. Amidst this, I began noticing issues with the web app used to input the customs data. I saw how the data entry application made you manually type in derivable and duplicate data. It was a web application, so I figured I could develop an extension to improve it. I was right.

Using JavaScript, I created bookmarklets to streamline the data entry process reducing the time to audit a package by half. The efficiency gains were huge, but I mostly liked that my coworkers were happier and the supervisors yelled less. This experience solidified my desire to combine my technical and creative skills to write software that helps people.

Since then, I have been learning and practicing web development as often as possible. I am excited to continue to grow and to take on new challenges.

02. Interests and Hobbies

When I'm not coding or studying, I'm probably out hiking or jamming on my guitar with some friends.

03. Framework Preferences

I love the T3 stack. Typescript and Trpc in a Next.js mono repo make development fast and fun. The end-to-end type-safety makes setting up new procedure calls to the back end extremely fast while giving you protection against type errors that often happen across the boundaries of the application.

I also like Svelte and Svelte kit, but they don't have as large a community as React and Next.js.

I am also pragmatic and will use whatever tool best fits the job, so I maintain my knowledge of tools like PHP and Laravel.