About
I’m a web developer with a marketing management background. I moved to Los Angeles three years ago to pursue a career in marketing. However, after several years as the Marketing Director for a Venture Studio and again for an eCommerce brand, I discovered that my real passion lies in building products rather than promoting them. I’m a lifelong self-leaner and I find web development to be the incredibly fulfilling because to be a good developer means to never stop improving in an ever-changing industry. There’s nothing more satisfying to me than the creative problem solving that goes into turning business ideas into real solutions, continually improving those solutions, and eloquently abstracting them. I’ve always believed that ego is the killer of innovation, and as a junior developer I’m humbled at the opportunity to surround myself with a seasoned team to learn from. Yet, I’m also a self-starter fueled by the power of Google, StackOverflow, and, of course, too much caffeine. You may be wondering why would I choose to go from a pretty senior position in marketing to a junior position web development… Well, there a that sums it it perfectly: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. Marketing is all about setting a strategy, occasionally tweaking it, but mostly just maintaining consistency. This ‘consistency’ ultimately left me feeling intellectually unfulfilled. So much so, that I was willing to 360 my career through the long journey of learning more than ‘just enough’ web development. I decided to take this past year to go above and beyond of what’s expected from coding bootcamp grads to implement full-fledged complex products using numerous complex technologies outside of the bootcamp’s scope in order to mimic real-world projects.
I know I have much to learn but I can’t wait to share my thoughts and creations with you along the way.
So far I’ve built published a Wikipedia Explorer CLI Ruby gem, a Sinatra App for keeping plants healthy, a Rails App for helping teams better communicate and track their KPIs, and I have migrated the UMA ecommerce store from Woocommerce to Shopify with scripting to export/import historical data between the Woocommerce and Shopify APIs. I also enjoy creating unique front end interface concepts like my mobile menu concept on Codepen. Recently, I built a Gatsbyjs blog using Material Ui that’s integrated with WordPress CMS… but I’m currently building Shopify conversion rate optimization apps.
Let’s grab coffee!
Best,
Katrina Brinson
Cheers to dreaming in code!