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Call me Liam, if you want! Across the web, my main handle is animalelder …which is an anagram for Liam Learned!
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I am a full-stack developer--a generalist with a strong focus on technical decisions. I love reading documentation and technical articles. I am an intensely curious person and that is what drives me. In my previous life, I was a special education teacher, but I wanted a new challenge and decided to make the shift into tech.
I am a graduate of the web development course at Career Foundry. I consider myself a generalist, because I love reaching deep into many topics that, when summarized or categorized, do not fit neatly into a binary of front and back ends.
I seem to have coding dreams—or general creative problem solving—almost daily. It’s weird, but that’s how my brain works.
I actually gravitated towards coding because I have always loved puzzles. Coding provides a degree of mental satisfaction very similar to solving puzzles. For me, it goes beyond simply acquiring the declarative knowledge--the fun part is to apply that knowledge in different situations and contexts in order to create new things or just solve problems in creative ways.
JavaScript was my gateway language, so it will always hold a place in my heart. I have had experience with a lot of frameworks, libraries, and tools in the JS landscape: React, jQuery, Angular, Express, Astro, Hono...to metas like Next.js and NestJS.
Although I am often writing JSX over HTML, I still practice writing vanilla JS with HTML5 and CSS3. I love reading about advanced concepts of CSS and I am also a big fan of Tailwind.
I also taught myself Python and I love learning about many other areas that we can talk about, if you're interested--I love having technical discussions. Things like relational and document database flavors, serverless tools, Docker and containers, caching like Redis, queues like Kafka & RabbitMQ, and a love of terminal-based workflows with tools such as NeoVim.
Outside of JavaScript and Python, I have begun learning about some of the popular compiled languages such as Rust, C, and Go.
I was trying to keep this short, but my passion for nerd stuff made that a challenging goal. But if you'd like to have chats about any of the aforementioned topics, or one of your personal passions--I love talking tech and I learning about new things.
I have lived in Las Vegas for most of my life and have been sharing a world with my wife—my best friend—for eight years and counting!