I'm a midwest dad in tech. I'm currently a Frontend Web Developer, focused mostly on building accessible web applications. My educational background is in Graphic Design, but I have been building on the web for over a decade. I'll occassionally write about Web Development, career, and whatever else I feel like. If you want to know more about me, you can find me on LinkedIn or GitHub.
The full story
I grew up playing video games and tinkering with the family computer. I was always fascinated by technology. "Build robots" was my childhood career choice whenever asked (mostly because I was obsessed with Mega Man).
I eventually took up drawing, inspired by the comics I was reading (Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield) and wanted to become a cartoonist. I was always the kid drawing pictures all over his stuff in class, frequently covering pages upon pages of worksheets with doodles. I also started getting to know the internet, thanks to a family friend who setup our first PC with a dial-up connection. The web was magical to me, and when social media came around, I became focused on expressing myself by customizing my online presence via custom HTML using the editors provided by these platforms.
When it came time for college, I chose Graphic Design as my major, as I had been starting to dabble in digital art / adobe tools during high school. While I enjoyed this, and all of the general art classes this came with, I quickly realized I didn't want to be doing that kind of thing for clients, let alone assignments. I wanted this kind of creativity to remain something I did for myself, on my own terms.
Still early in college, I kept going back to the web, and had a great interest in creating and designing websites and app UIs, but it wasn't enough to just create mockups in photoshop. I wanted to be able to build the things I was creating. Once again, I was able to utilize the web as a resource, and learned how to properly code websites via Youtube videos and online tutorials (Shoutout Travis Neilson).
I chose to not switch majors, and instead focus on continuing to code on the side. One day, I noticed a local web agency had an internship opening, and I applied as a web designer, thinking I could atleast get some experience in that world. It turned out that all of their design positions were filled, but they had one last opening for a web developer intern and asked if I would be interested, as I had listed some coding experience on my resume. I've been coding the web ever since, and have been fortunate enough to make a career out of it.