I learned to build websites before I learned to drive.
It started in high school, in the early days of the web, when a page was just HTML and a dream and you learned by viewing source on sites you admired. I taught myself. I loved it immediately — the logic of it, the craft of it, the way you could make something out of nothing and put it in front of the whole world. But I thought of it as a hobby. What I wanted to be was a journalist.
So I studied communication at Kennesaw State, got recruited by the executive director of the Center for Sustainable Journalism while I was still a senior, and went to work for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange covering one of the most important and least-covered beats in American journalism. I wrote longform narratives about child welfare and the justice system. I won a Society of Professional Journalists Green Eyeshade Award. I worked my way from intern to managing editor. I loved it.
But journalism was reckoning with a digital future, and I was the person in the room who knew how to build a website. So in addition to reporting and editing, I started taking on the coding projects. Then more coding projects. Then I was designing and building the organization's web presence, overseeing digital strategy, and managing special projects — while still writing and editing. Eventually I was splitting my time evenly between the two, and I was falling more and more in love with the code side.
A friend who worked at a software company suggested I apply. It was hard to leave journalism — and everything I'd built at the CSJ — behind. But it felt like the right move. I took the job.
Since then I've built front-end applications at IBM, ADP, Vanguard, and NBCUniversal, among others. Complex Angular applications. Design systems. Component libraries. The kind of work that takes everything I know about how to structure information and how people read and how things should feel — and applies it to software.
The two careers look different from the outside. From the inside, the craft is the same. A well-structured component and a well-structured story both start with the same question: what does this person need, and how do I give it to them as clearly as possible?
The code, the story, the song — it's all the same impulse. Make something. Make it well. Put it in front of people.