A couple of my greatest strengths include interpersonal/team work, and problem-solving. I consider myself an introverted personality type, but I really enjoy and prefer working and collaborating on teams—it gives me the opportunity to learn new and cool things from my teammates, and for us to build a better overall application. And I enjoy problem-solving in many aspects of my life from solving a jigsaw puzzle in my free-time, to solving home-improvement issues. I even struggle to pull myself away from a task (as my wife can attest) because I can't stop thinking about how to tackle a problem or improve a project!
I'm looking for an opportunity to work on a team of developers building and improving the applications. My skillset leans toward front-end technologies but I'm open to learning new concepts especially as I am familiar with a lot of the fundamentals of software engineering and very comfortable with anything JavaScript related.
My most recent project is an application called Board Together—it was built with React, and implements Router for URL route matching, and some React Hooks for state management. The idea was to create an application in which a user can peruse popular books (for the current week) in a variety of genres, and save them for reading later. Cypress testing framework was also incorporated to test as many facets of the user experience as possible. The primary challenge I faced with this project was global state management, in particular utilizing the useReducer hook. It proved difficult changing state as complex as this seeing as state is "read only". Having to make a copy of state, then making any changes and re-assigning state was a challenge to wrap my head around at times, but I feel I came out the other side with a much better understanding of this.
I'm currently looking at expanding on the Neatflix project by writing a simple backend API using Express.js and hosted on vercel. This will allow for more control of the information incorporated into the application and will even allow the user to sign in and see their own book ratings, comments, and reviews.
