About
Hi, I’m Jennifer
I love learning.
I like to create purposeful websites, develop useful web applications, automate tedious tasks, and find creative solutions for businesses to grow. I’m passionate about software development because it gives me the unique opportunity to solve new problems every day and pushes me to continuously learn.
Why did I want to create this blog?
How did I get started in software development?
I got a college degree in Public Health and Psychology from UC Berkeley. At the time, I wanted to work at a health clinic serving the Vietnamese-American community. After quitting a job screening people at a call center for depression, I ended up working at my family’s printing shop, Select Graphics and Printing. While it was supposed to be temporary, I ended up really liking business development, marketing, sales, and customer service.
After almost 5 years working there, I came to a fork in the road. Do I want to do this forever and end up owning the company, or do I want to do something different? Wearing many different hats while I worked there, the project I was most proud of was creating an ecommerce website that generated about $10,000/month in sales. I was able to create a website through a content management system, picking up some simple HTML along the way, but I felt like I was so limited when I wanted to do something more “complicated” like making an image carousel. I wanted to learn more about this.
Finally, I decided that I would explore programming, and I quit my full-time job to go to a 3-month full-time intensive coding bootcamp. While I was there, I met other students who I studied with after class and went to many tech meetups on Javascript and other technical topics. I got a job as a web developer at Glidewell right after the bootcamp ended.
While at Glidewell, I started as a web developer creating static websites. To accelerate my learning and make extra income, I also offered freelance services making websites for small businesses. After 2 years, I transitioned to a full-stack software engineer writing Angular and React apps, debugging C# services, and architecting systems using AWS services. I learned so much on the job from other software engineers in the department. In the beginning, it felt so hard, and I spend so many hours outside of work taking Udemy courses on development to catch up to my peers. In 2018, I officially certified and passed the AWS exams, receiving the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification and the AWS Developer Associate certification.
Now, I’m currently working full-time as a Front-End Software Engineer at Acorns, contributing to the Acorns web-application, standardizing our codebases, as well as automating processes.
It’s been a wild ride and quite a struggle, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
What do I do in my free time?
On my free time, I like to read articles and books about business development, psychology, historical fiction, and science-fiction. I’m not just a geek though. I love hiking, cooking cultural cuisines, trying new restaurants, and spending quality time with family and friends. I’m always itching to travel to see places I have never been before (the best is when I use my credit card points to go). They say, “when you’re uncomfortable, you’re growing.”
