To borrow a term from Joel Hooks, I like to think of my GitHub account as my "digital garden." There are flowers, weeds and truthfully some close-to-dead plants in there I keep forgetting to water. But it contains so many projects, from as far back as my time in coding bootcamp.
I'm currently working on making this section beautiful. In the meantime, please check out my GitHub account. Here are some of my blue-ribbon roses:
I presented this on two separate occasions, for a previous employer's Tech and Marketing departments. The presentation led to a retrospective conversation about the design practices and front-end architecture at the company. From this presentation, we began using Angular Material in our Angular applications, which led to increased efficiency on work, and greater collaboration between the Tech and Marketing teams.
This presentation stemmed from a problem we needed to solve at a previous role. We were in the midst of a website migration, and realized the content in the Content Management System (CMS) was exceptionally messy. I'm talking multiple instances of the same blog post, with absolutely no clear indication why there were multiples and which option was the source of truth. We were anticipating having to write some gnarly SQL, and estimating it would take months to accomplish.
But then we remembered we only needed to pull static data from the website (author names, dates, metadata, etc). We leveraged web scraping (via BeautifulSoup) to grab the data instead of relying on the messy database. A project estimated to take months ended up taking a couple weeks! 🎉
This was my first-ever presentation at a meetup. I was SO nervous and I can hear it all over this video. But I'm also exceptionally proud with how this demo went and that I put myself out there.
Thanks again to the Akron Software Craftsmanship Meetup for having me! Go ahead and watch the recording below.