CHAR 
Engineering, circus, gardening ... and random animal facts
I'm zigzagging my way through life! Too many interests and not enough time. I got my fingers in all the pies!
About me!
I got my B.S. in electrical engineering from UIUC and worked as an epitaxy engineer for a number of years. Just recently, I completed the Software Engineering course at Flatiron School and am roaring to dive even deeper into the world of software development!
Between lasers and programming, I have a deep love of circus arts. I joined a fulltime program in Chicago to train in acrobatics, aerial arts, and a focus of contortion!
Resume
- Backend and Frontend experience
- Familiarity with Ruby/Rails/React, Javascript
- HTML, CSS, SCSS
- History with Python, MATLAB, Java
- SQL, Postgres, Excel
Projects
Most of these are Flatiron projects, and as a result were done under directions to demonstrate mastery of certain skills.
The apps I've deployed on Heroku run on the free dyno tier and will sleep after 30 mins of inactivity. When viewing an app, there may be a 30 second wait when the backend is initially called.
Six Clicks
A wikirace style game. Choose a starting and ending point and count the number pages it takes to get to the target page. Try it out here.
This Rails/React App interacts with the WikiMedia API and then embeds an article within the app as a react component. I used Redux to track the clicks within the article page and saved the data to a REST server.
I learned a lot while working on this project. Some things about programming, but mostly about the random Wikipedia pages I found myself scrolling through while "testing" it.
Pummel
A simple game styled after Whack-a-Mole. Use the numpad to bop the baddies and gain points. Check it out here.
The majority of the game is written with JavaScript, and makes asynchronous calls to the Rails backend where level-specific data is stored.
While it was incredibly fun to make, my favorite part honestly is the cute monster icons I found.
trivichar
A collaborative trivia app. Make different rounds and questions and publish them for others to play. Take a look here.
This Rails project was my first introduction to server-side rendering as well as using a CSS framework. The look and feel was done entirely using Tailwind.
I also got to enable authentication and how to work with permissions to limit access to various resources.
flishflash
An app to create and organize flashcards into groups and be able to practice with them. Make some cards yourself here.
I made FlishFlash using Sinatra. There is user authentication so anyone can save their own sets to work with. I got to practice CRUD operations with this project and get familiar with Actice Record.
purkamyern
A CLI app using Ruby to emulate a Pokedex. This was my first Flatiron project. The idea is to save any pokemon you "see" by adding it to the Pokedex then access it for more information later.
I used the PokeAPI to access information about each pokemon to be saved and got to learn about using information from external sources.
The app acts as a single Pokedex that is supposed to exist within a network of other devices. The goal would be to come back and develop the full functionality to include a whille network that multiple Pokedexes could work on.
circuschar
My circus portfolio page. It's got pictures and videos!
This was the first project I worked on from conception to deployment. I found this especially challenging at the time because I had no experience with frontend programming besides HTML and CSS.
I used a bootstrap template as my basis and stitched it together with other components to make my first site and deploy it.
