A thirty-something woman who as a child coveted electronic toys above plush ones, I am an old-school nerd in more ways than one. I like to do things by hand, be it sewing with a needle and thread (how delightfully archaic!), or coding HTML in a plain text document…pushing my desk uphill in knee-deep snow whilst barefoot… I may be exaggerating somewhere in there.

There’s something I get with working with my hands that I don’t receive when being overwhelmed by a complicated sewing machine, or clicking code modules in a bloatware webpage editor. If you know what you’re doing, you can sew a garment by hand nearly as fast as you can with a machine, by the time you’re done twiddling all its knobs and attachments into their proper positions. And me? I blow up sewing machines. Well, I jam them, which is fixable, but I’m still useless with them. And a webpage? It loads much faster if you remove as much redundant and unnecessary code and uncompressed graphics as possible. Do you know which tags are depreciated, or why a webpage isn’t displaying correctly? Perhaps I don’t, but I know how to find out really quickly. That’s just how I roll.

Could I learn how to use a sewing machine, and stop treating it like a necessary arch nemesis, and churn out clothing much faster than I do right now? Sure. And I mean to. Really. I have tutorial websites and videos bookmarked and everything. I just haven’t gotten to it yet. And while I look at the used machine in the corner longingly, I use a needle and thread readily enough for now.

And who codes raw HTML anymore? A frightful few, sad to say. But it is quite a useful talent when it comes to reading raw PHP, and being able to discern exactly where a missing tag makes the whole website go bonkers. I read source code like I read books on my Kindle: quickly, surely, and accurately.

Sewing and hand coding websites are just two of my weird, self-taught talents. I went to community college in my youth, but they weren’t teaching any of the internet technologies I was drawn to. I purchased books and taught myself fourteen different programming and web-specific languages, among them HTML, Javascript, Java, and PHP. I’ve always been like that: self-motivated, self-reliant, and loathe to sit still when I could be learning something else. At the moment, I’m teaching myself HTML5 thanks to various free resources online.

I started doing freelance work because I’ve always had a fierce entrepreneurial spirit. I love the thought of being my own boss, being entirely responsible for a project from its inception to its conclusion. Thanks to this streak of mine, I’ve been everything from a dogwalker, housesitter, and delivery person to a web developer, social media wrangler, and promotional material distributor (I drove around a nice car with obnoxious ads on it and handed out promo swag at events and parking lots all over counties in Washington, Oregon, and Arizona).

As you might note in my blog, I enjoy doing a great many things, sometimes all at once. I like being creative whether it’s tackling a do-it-yourself craft project or singing. I enjoy coffee with friends, time with my husband, and a good nap. I listen to tech-related podcasts whether I’m working or playing. I always keep a sharp eye and ear out for new widgets, technologies, and buzz words. I dislike buzz words immensely but I do enjoy demystifying them for myself and others.