Web and Mobile Developer
I am a Web and Mobile Developer specializing in React and React Native. While I love building applications in general, I prefer to work on projects that advance a leftist vision of society. Before becoming a developer, I taught college Spanish for almost twenty years. My experience in the humanities lends me a unique insight into the tech world.
My transition from the field of higher education to that of web development began in 2016, when I completed Udacity's Intro to Programming Nanodegree, and culminated in 2019, when I completed the Front-End Web Developer and React Nanodegrees. I was fortunate to have earned a scholarship through the Grow With Google Initiative to the Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree. During this program, I wrote about my career transition in a Medium blog post (see the link in the "Related" section), and earned another scholarship to the React Nanodegree.
As I was completing my career change, I was also becoming engaged politically. In 2016, I became a part of the movement that sprang up around the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, volunteering to make phone calls to voters and engaging with fellow campaign volunteers. After the election, I remained politically active, volunteering for organizations such as Justice Democrats.
Ever since obtaining my certification in 2019, I have been working on projects with a progressive slant. I started by serving on the team that created BernieBnB–an AirB&B–style application for volunteers of the Sanders 2020 campaign (see the link in the "Related" section). Moreover, from October of 2020 through December of 2024, I was a mobile developer at the OptOut Media Foundation, where I assisted in the development of OptOut News, a non-profit independent news aggregator app (see the link in the "Related" section for more info), and also made enhancements to the organization's website.