I’m a full stack web developer.

My expertise is in front-end, but I’ve also done my fair share of backend programming too. Additionally, I tinker with all sorts of things, but my passion is building rich user interfaces.

So what languages and frameworks do you use for the frontend?

For the front-end I’ve been using React recently. I also use a few of the more popular libraries for it, such as React Router and Styled Components (love that one). When I’m working with GraphQL, I lean towards the Apollo Client library as well. In addition to React, I had also tinkered with Vue at one point, but never got around to doing anything major with it.

Before I used React, or when I’m working on a project that doesn’t use React, I like to use Sass (the SCSS flavor) for my CSS, as it is a huge time saver.

And for backend?

As far as language, I use Node.js. I often use Express as well for the framework. I’ve worked with Apollo Server when I’m working with GraphQL server-side too. When I need to store data for an extended period of time, I usually reach for a relational database like Postgres or MySQL. To make things syntactically easier when working in Node, I use Knex.js for building the queries.

If you’d like to see how I use these technologies, feel free to check out some of my projects.

Where’d you get your programming start?

I’ve always liked working with computers, and I’m also quite curious as well. At one point in time quite a while ago, I had wanted to build a website, so I did some research and discovered HTML. Not long into that, I realized that development was way out of my experience range. (that was back in the CSS 2 days). I continued to tinker with it a bit, but I was never really passionate about it. At some point, I had gotten involved in a robotics team, and for a year or so, I was really the only computer-savvy student at that time (although, I wasn’t really that computer savvy back then.). Since there was really nobody else, I struggled through (with a mentor’s help) writing the robot software in LabView. The next year, another student joined who had experience with Java, so I kinda hopped on the Java train for a bit, because for some reason, I didn’t really like the graphical programming environment of LabView.

At some point in the middle of all of this, I discovered JavaScript. I worked on it in my free time (particularly in the off-season of robotics.), and somehow, I’ve stuck with it and continued with web development ever since.