I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area my whole life. I've moved to 5 different cities in the area, including San Jose. Even with the constant moving, the rise of internet in the 2010s made it easy to keep in touch with friends, so I naturally spent a lot of time on my computer.
In my teenage years, I got into competitive swimming. I won a few medals for my local swim team and got pretty obssessed with improving my times. There was some degree of pride attached to it, but moreso than that, I loved the feeling of control I had when performing at a high level — like every part of my body moved how I wanted it to. For the same reason, I also fell into the massive rabbit hole that is osu!, a PC rhythm game I poured thousands of hours getting good at and hit a peak rank of top 2,000 global.
Later on, I studied Statistics at Univeristy of California Riverside. I learned how to work with datasets, use statistical methods to analyze them, and present interpretable findings with them.
The prerequisites for my upper-division courses called for a few Computer Science courses, which prompted my first contact with the programming world.
My first ever programming course covered C++, where we went over the basic syntax and patterns in programming languages, like variables, functions, operators, loops, etc.
Over time, I got hooked on making functional software. I realized the same drive I had for improving swim times and climbing osu! ranks carried over into software. There's something deeply rewarding about refining an app until it feels smooth, intuitive, and enjoyable to use. I decided to pursue a Computer Science minor and take more related courses, but there was only so much hands-on programming these courses had to offer.
So I looked into different outlets for creating software and came across freeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design course. I ended up diving deep into the Frontend, starting with HTML & CSS, then JavaScript.
I also went through The Odin Project and their Full Stack JavaScript curriculum, where I picked up React, SQL, Node.js/Express, and more specifics about web development.
Going through their lessons and smaller projects were great learning experiences, but the most learning I've done is through my own projects. I've built these projects over the past year or so, such as zenbu and Talkify, which the latter I did in collaboration with 3 other developers.
Working on projects made me realize how even small design choices can make or break a user's experience. Just like how datasets become most useful when presented clearly in Statistics, I believe web apps should feel effortless to navigate and accessible to everyone.
Right now, I'm studying up on Golang since I've heard many great things about it. I've also been learning more about more DevOps-oriented things like Docker, CI/CD, and cloud services. I'm planning on implementing these in a new project that might be showcased here in the near future, so stay tuned.
If you want to get in touch with me, send me an email at wikki.rho@gmail.com