Timeline

2023

28 Jan, 2023

Accessible Card Booster Pack Opening Game

Improved Site Accessibility

Worked on a side project

Creating CSS animations

Deployed a site on Netlify

I was one of the web devs for this Pokemon-style booster pack opening game! Working with devs across the world on a web game for an audience of 1000s of other fans was intellectually and personally fulfilling.

https://github.com/elysiumdelivery/altare-tcg/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uQ_AvFaFk&t=1475s - showcasing the site on livestream!

As technical PM and accessibility dev, I chose the tech stack, wrote the spec, and reviewed 3 international teammates' code for: opening 10-card packs with rarities (Vanilla JS), flip/ shine effects (CSS animations), filtering collection of up to 300 unique cards, deployment to Netlify.

Implemented keyboard and live announcement support for card flip interaction, focus trap in card details modal, and semantic HTML throughout site. Guided teammates to incorporate accessibility into their changes.

Image alt text:

1. Section of the credits page on the site where I'm listed.

2. Collections tab on site showing 33 out of 290 cards pulled, 4 total pulls, and a gallery of the collected cards

2022

15 Aug, 2022

Gave an internal talk

Taught Figma basics

Presented "Figma for Non-Designers"

Compiled the experience I recently gained from fumbling in Figma for the first time into a 1 hour workshop to internal engineers, product managers, and other non-designers. Created interactive exercises and guided participants through applying Figma's asset library, "hug"/ "fill", components, and autolayout to create design patterns common in Pilot's app.

16 Jun, 2022

Used a design system

Designed a new feature

Built a new feature

used Figma

Tried out Figma for the first time

Designed a mock-up in Figma

Wireframed a new feature in Figma

With the recent departure of our team's designer, our project manager and I stepped up to design a new email configuration page. She provided a strong understanding of user needs and some cobbled together screenshots, and I translated those to a Figma wireframe aligning with Pilot's design system. Having worked closely on numerous features with our team's ex-designer, I had a good sense for how to apply the design system and how the Figma components correspond with our codebase's components.

This was an exciting milestone for me since I've always been interested in learning how to design!

04 Apr, 2022

Designed my own learning path

Received art coaching

Did a 30 minute Art Coaching Session

Over Google Meet, shared some of my work with a professional artist who quickly identified that practicing solid shapes and perspective would improve my art. He redlined my drawings and shared his thought process on how he would go about drawing the same things I was trying to draw. I also was given some NMA art courses that would be most helpful towards my goals.

https://coaching.nma.art/

07 Mar, 2022

Decorated my office

Upgraded kitchen

Upped My Kitchen And Office Game

Kitchen:

Instant Pot pressure cooker/ air fryer
Lavender Always Pot, with pink bow pot handle pinchers to make it look like Hello Kitty
Walnut cutting board
Magnetic spice shelves on the fridge
A Global knife I picked after going in-store to William Sonoma to try a bunch of different knives out
A spoon shaped like a leaf

Renter-friendly Office Things:

Nanoleaf Elements (thanks to Tamas constantly keeping them in the surface of my consciousness)
Fake plants
Shelves where assembly is just twisting some tubes into the boards, to display my plush animals
A magnetic whiteboard and Etsy magnets for pinning art prints, coupons, and mail I need to open.

Twitter thread with product links in the future maybe.

16 Feb, 2022

Designed a mock-up in Figma

Wrote a technical proposal for a codebase-wide project

Unified frontend code under design system

Got the Ball Rolling on a Long-Stagnant Reskinning Project

Quarters ago, the Design team had provided beautiful mocks of a site redesign, with the goal of unifying the look and feel of the Pilot platform. Sadly, these designs were laying dormant.

This is because typically, a "design system" engineering team owns the effort, but Pilot has no such team. Our frontend engineers are decentralized on separate teams, with feature work being their main priority. To achieve this makeover, work had to be broken down into small chunks such that any product engineer could grab whenever they had a few hours to spare. We also wanted the work to ship iteratively and right away.

In Figma, I edited Design's reskin wireframes to imagine some "intermediary" aesthetic states that would allow the site to look visually coherent while engineers revamped pages one by one.

Garnering interest and approval through sharing my Figma file around with a proposal document, several frontend engineers got together to convert some pages. We found the page conversion experience was quick and safe (repetitive CSS changes no risk of breaking functionality). With some working intermediary-reskinned pages, we presented some screenshots to a designer, who gave us the green light. We proceeded to push these pages to prod as quick and highly visible wins for the reskin project.

Through this engineer-designer collaboration, we had a plan that was safe (no scary, all-or-nothing merges) and compatible with our design/ engineering capacity constraints.

2021

20 Dec, 2021

Designed my own learning path

Started strength training

Started exercising consistently for the first time in my life

Throughout school, I was always the last to finish running laps. Into adulthood, walking around a suburban neighborhood is abysmally boring, and the thought of being perceived by others at a gym is horrifying. However, I hear 30 year olds say one day they wake up and a joint stops bending, and I don't want that to be me.

I took a vacation day just to work up the courage to sign up for MyCoPilot after mulling for months, fearing I'd be too tough a customer for my trainer to work with. My trainer ended up being really receptive to my requests for a gentle pace and avoiding certain exercises that didn't make me feel good. I've since been keeping up with 10 minutes of basic strength movements almost daily in my room (often last minute before bed), and my coach has praised me for my mindfulness towards form and listening to my body.

31 Oct, 2021

Attended Clarity Conference 2021

Connected with design system engineers and designers

Networked as an introvert

Designed my own learning path

Followed conference speakers on Twitter

Attended Clarity Conf 2021

1. Ambiguous purpose leads to burnout. Find what energizes you and use that to define your priorities and boundaries. - Design Systems Burnout, Lauren LoPrete
2. Design is intertwined with addiction. When the focus is on "bigger user bases", "daily active users", addiction becomes the goal of work. Just because we can remove friction doesn't mean we always should. Move fast, break people. - Dysfunctional Systems: Digital Products and Addiction, John Voss
3. Dark mode is more than just inversing the palette. - The Diff After Dark Mode, Diana Mounter

The other highlight was socializing in gather.town and playing Drag Queen Bingo with other attendees. The virtual social events were organic and effective at spurring casual conversation, minus the awkward dance of joining a conversing group in physical spaces. I felt like I talked to more people than I would have at a physical conference.

30 May, 2021

Finished The Art & Science of Drawing SHADING FUNDAMENTALS by Brent Eviston

Designed my own learning path

Took a Shading Course

This course was only 1.5 hours long and what was taught wasn't completely new to me, so I completed it quickly.
I liked that it articulated lighting concepts that I was vaguely grasping at via intuition before. Now I can be more intentional about how I shade.
https://www.udemy.com/course/the-art-science-of-drawing-shading-fundamentals

21 May, 2021

Started Ice Skating

Designed my own learning path

Resumed ice skating after 1 year+ of Never Leaving The House

14 May, 2021

Interacted with open source VueJS code

First Pull Request

Contributed a pull request

Improved keyboard accessibility for an open source project

Submitted a PR to Vue Multiselect

My first official pull request ever, driven by a bug fix my company's product needs + the desire to no longer maintain a custom fork.
https://github.com/shentao/vue-multiselect/pull/1432

08 May, 2021

Designed my own learning path

Discovered a mentoring resource through Twitter

Watched "Giving and Receiving Feedback"

The talk "covers a bunch of actionable steps to help you give and receive feedback more effectively, with less anxiety."
https://chelseatroy.com/2019/09/19/video-recording-from-pivotal-lunch-series-giving-and-receiving-feedback/

02 Apr, 2021

Took CSS for Javascript Developers by Josh Comeau

Discovered a learning resource through Twitter

Designed my own learning path

Took CSS for JavaScript Developers

Taking a structured course on how JavaScript works under the hood made a big difference in my ability to navigate tough JS code. I've been wanting to achieve the same with CSS. https://css-for-js.dev/

24 Mar, 2021

Took Introduction to Vue.js by Sarah Drasner on Frontend Masters

Designed my own learning path

Onboarded to a New Codebase

Learned Vue coming from Angular

Took Introduction to Vue.js

This course helped me quickly map my Angular knowledge to Vue and start reading the Vue codebase at my new job. https://frontendmasters.com/courses/vue/

22 Mar, 2021

Designed a frontend framework interview question

Wrote interviewer playbook for interview question

Set up an interview question in codesandbox

Designed a frontend framework interview question

I channeled my frustrating experiences with interviewing to craft a compassionate, well-documented interview question with a rubric in collaboration with another teammate. The interview includes:
- Opportunities to discuss framework features, technical tradeoffs, and product questions
- Flexibility to do the coding portion solo or to pair with the interviewer
- Rubric measures "presence" of key traits, instead of pass/fail

17 Mar, 2021

Shadowed user research sessions

Watched user researcher guide several end users through the design of the feature I've been assigned to build.

Sitting in on user research for the features I'm building was a bucket list item I had for years that I crossed off today. Really excited to be at a company that intentionally makes time for their engineers to be engaged in the design process!

08 Mar, 2021

Taking Digitally Painting Light and Color: Amateur to Master by Austin Batchelor

Designed my own learning path

Partially Took a Light and Color Course

Got a better sense for how colors mix, particularly in reflected light. https://www.udemy.com/course/master-painting-light-and-color-amateur-to-advanced/
I ended up not watching the full course. Might come back later.

11 Feb, 2021

Interviewed for a frontend developer role

Job Searching

Finished job searching

This was my first industry job search, which was different from my new grad search. Lessons learned:

Grappling with good-but-not-perfect offers can show that my "top must-haves" list is different than what I thought
If I'm hesitating so much on an offer, that in itself is the sign to pass
Networking while I wasn't actively looking paid off
Interviewing at a pace to align multiple offers together is not for me
The first group of companies I enter the process with is a "warmup" round. Offers received (if any) probably aren't the best I can do

Tagging Cassidy since she ran JavaScript practice interviews with me and offered her network/ advice!

20 Jan, 2021

Joined an Early Adopter Program

Joined Polywork

I'm super excited to check out Polywork as one of the first 100 early adopters. Thanks @cassidoo for sharing the opportunity!

2020

01 Dec, 2020

Finished The Art & Science of Figure Drawing: GESTURE by Brent Eviston

Designed my own learning path

Finished a Figure Drawing Course

I bought https://www.udemy.com/course/figuredrawing/ over a year ago and figured (ha) I should finish it before buying more.I liked how the instructor didn't overwhelm me with anatomy details. Instead, he pointed out critical details to focus on that made a huge difference in the quality of the drawing.

01 Oct, 2020

Attended Virtual Grace Hopper 2020

Connected with conference speakers

Networked with attendees at vGHC 2020

Attended a women in tech conference

Attended Virtual Grace Hopper 2020

My favorite part was the "track" networking where we entered waiting rooms of certain topics and got randomly assigned to smaller breakouts of 2-10. I mainly went to the Human Computer Interaction room and met a great variety of students, professors, designers, and devs!

25 Apr, 2020

Attended Women of React Conf

Listened to a tech talk on cognitive metaphor

Followed conference speakers on Twitter

Listened to a tech talk on illustrating technical concepts

Attended a women in tech conference

Attended Women of React Conf

My favorite talk was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQGe9zxlRdk which called listeners to break down the barriers to tech by bringing visual metaphors to technical documentation.
"Documentation is a visual desert. The way web development is currently explained and taught limits what thinkers can join this community."

30 Mar, 2020

Designed my own learning path

Attended Perfmatters 2020

Followed conference speakers on Twitter

Attended Perfmatters 2020

My first virtual conference and exposure to the world of web performance
https://perfmattersconf.com/

2018

15 Sep, 2018

Started Ice Skating

Designed my own learning path

Took First Ice Skating Lesson

Adult intro class, learning forward pushes and twizzles (making lemon shapes)

01 Jan, 2018

Graduated from Scripps College

Graduated from a women's college

BA in Linguistics & Cognitive Science

2017

01 Jul, 2017

Completed a frontend software intern project

Completed Cisco's Summer Internship Program

Designed UI Flow for a Query Builder

Interned at Cisco

I worked on the web app for an escalation team's bug tracking tool. The app was written in Python by a team member that didn't know Python, so there was lots for me to improve on. I brought my UIUX interest into the opportunity by applying what I read in "The Design of Everyday Things" and "Don't Make Me Think" (which I read on the plane ride there) in designing the tag searching feature. I also did some user testing by watching my teammates try out the flow I designed and incorporated their feedback.

15 Jan, 2017

Learned about embodied cognition

Took a college course

Wrote literary analyses

Heard about course from another student

Took "Fiction, Paintings, Film & The Cognitive Sciences"

Heard about this course through word-of-mouth. It was in the "Romance Literature" section of the course catalog...

Introduced concepts such as embodied cognition, theory of mind, the power of narratives, mirror neurons, etc. and how they apply to movies and literature. Authors we read included: V.S. Ramachandran, Daniel Kahneman, Laurie Santos, Michael Gazzaniga, Yuval Harari, Nassim Taleb, Steven Pinker, and George Lakoff.

For the final paper we wrote a cognitive analysis on The Great Beauty, an artistic film with aesthetically stunning scenes that reveal the reality of Rome's decline.

This video is a summary of the class in 6 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F2tvJSz3CE

15 Jan, 2017

Took an intro to UX course

Took a college course

Took "Human Centered Design"

Heard about this one through word-of-mouth, as it was an elective under "engineering"...

Taught by a team including an ex-IDEO professor, we got hands-on practice on user research, rapid prototyping, and design thinking. Our team projects included prompts such as "reimagine the library space" and "redesign the DMV organ donation process".

2016

01 Aug, 2016

Took a course on consciousness

Took a college course

Failed at reading research papers

Took "Consciousness and Cognition"

Learned about what consciousness is through subliminal priming, blindsight, neurological disorders that affect consciousness, and more. For the final paper, we had to write about whether Ken Parks was conscious when he drove to his mother in law's house in his sleep, basing our opinion in modern models of consciousness.

I struggled in this class. I couldn't concentrate on the dense research papers, which helped me decide to not pursue the academia side of cognitive science. Moreover, the tests were rigorous but pushed me to learn the concepts deeply.

2015

15 Jun, 2015

Taught middle schoolers Python

Guided students through learning activities

Created decorations for the classroom

Failed to get a tech internship

College Freshman Summer - Programming Teaching Assistant

Taught Computer Programming, Computer Programming Masters, and Mobile Game Design at The Tech Museum in downtown San Jose

https://galileo-camps.com/our-camps/summer-camps-at-the-tech/

2014

01 Aug, 2014

Wrote literary analyses

Examined literature through V.S. Ramachandran's writing on free will

Took a college course

Attended a women's college

Freshman CORE Writing Course - Patty Hearst

Wrote literary analyses on Patty Hearst's autobiography and Ta-Nehisi Coates' "A Case for Reparations" through the lens of V.S. Ramachanran and Marxist philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser to "explore the contingency (dependence on chance or on the fulfillment of a condition; uncertainty; fortuitousness) of the self."