how i got here
not every job made the cut. these are the chapters that actually shaped how I work.
2010–2013
my first real tech job wasn’t glamorous. i was a website content editor, managing content, fixing metadata, adding keywords that were missing, making sure images and videos didn’t slow a page down. nobody taught me seo. i just noticed what wasn’t working and fixed it. a few years later i redesigned a small company’s website the same way. no design background, no framework, just a site that looked better and worked better than it did before. i didn’t know it yet, but this was the beginning of everything.
2015–2018
i built my first ui mockups here. simple ones, nothing fancy, just enough to show a developer what a screen should do. i coordinated stakeholders across a project so big it won a lab wide award. i owned an entire organization’s branded email campaigns for two years, by hand, because nobody else had the time and i made it mine. people wanted me on their teams. i was told i couldn’t move into the roles i actually wanted because i didn’t know how to code. i took the redirection. i kept doing the work anyway, just under different titles.
2018–2019
this was the year i learned what a good analyst does. translating a business need into something a team could actually build, writing user stories, sketching interface mockups when there wasn’t a designer in the room. i learned that quality isn’t something you check for at the end, it’s something you build in from the first requirement. and i learned this particular seat wasn’t mine to keep. i wanted testing. i was told, again, that i needed a credential i didn’t have.
2020–2022
i left tech to go to esthetics school. i’d loved skincare since i was fifteen and wanted to see what that could be. covid stretched a one year program into something longer and harder to feel good about. i finished it. i’m still licensed. it didn’t become the career i thought it might, but it was never wasted. it was proof i could commit to something completely different and see it through.
2022–2024
two roles, back to back, and one throughline running through both of them. one gave me sign off authority, real ownership over a product’s quality from start to finish. the other handed me the deep, unglamorous craft, precise test cases, edge cases nobody else thought to check, documentation clear enough that anyone could follow it. different shapes of the same skill. by the end i understood quality assurance the way i understand it now, not a gate at the end of a project, but something you carry through the whole thing.
2024
a wordpress and elementor coaching program, and the door that closed on me back in 2015 finally opened. no code required. just structure, systems, and a builder that let me put everything i already knew, content, ui, quality, coordination, into something i could actually build myself. i didn’t need permission this time. i just needed the right tool.
2024–2025
i sold my house. i moved to the mountains. i spent a year rebuilding, my health, my sense of who i am, three songs i finally put out into the world, a slower pace of life i didn’t know i needed until i had it. somewhere in that year i built this portfolio, and got honest about what i actually am. developer, producer, qa. not a fallback i landed on because the other doors were closed. the actual shape of everything i’ve been building toward the whole time.
