About Catt
Hello there! My name is Catt and I'm a software developer in Boston, Massachusetts. I have an incredibly and impossibly long history of who I am and where my story comes from, but suffice to say, I've lived all over the world and have had many incredibly fulfilling adventures that bring me right to my desk in Boston coding web apps, learning more about data structures and algorithms, and now blogging about them.
My first ever code came from the book, C Primer that my dad sent me while I was living in Italy. I got as far as print Hello World. About five years later, I started learning about Python, still not coding anything real yet, but I started learning more about basic programming. I ended up getting a job at balena.io (ever use the disk-writing software Etcher? That was Juanchi's work!) first as basically an office manager (I wasn't (usually) responsible for cleaning the bathroom, but I did have to take care of some very unglamorous responsibilities), and later becoming the business development manager for EtcherPro for over a year.
I was able to learn about how to use the software, but nothing beyond some very basic ability to push code onto the devices with the balena CLI. My friends at balena including Chris, Konstantinos, David, Giovanni, Greg, Cameron, and many others, all helped me understand all the different products we had (balenaCloud, open balena, balenaEtcher, balenaEngine, EtcherPro, balenaOS) and a lot about how everything was built. Eventually, I came to have my own idea for a balenaCloud project, and developed Inkyshot, an inspiration e-ink display that dynamically updates remotely with the messages sent from the balenaCloud dashboard. It became a big project for balena and eventually a standard welcome gift for everyone joining balena.
Slowly, I started to build a clearer idea of programming, but it wasn't until I did a 12 week 450+ hour bootcamp with General Assembly that I finally started programming and building projects and apps that actually work when deployed. General Assembly was where I learned JavaScript and how to make API calls, DOM manipulation, Node.js, and closer to the end, React, which I hope to work on a lot more in this time. HTML and CSS were always pretty close to me as we had built blogs and websites growing up in school, but I also learned a lot more CSS in this course.
Anyway, that's a bit of my backstory in programming and my unconventional path to coding. If you want to dig more into the crazy person I am, pretty much every possible outlet of what I post and write online is linked at the end section of my dev portfolio, and the main social media I use is Instagram.
What this blog is for
In terms of what this blog is for, years ago, I practiced journal blogging as a way to learn content, and it worked really well when I focused on a subject I wanted to learn. It helped me to solidify ideas about what I learned that day and also created engagement with an online community that was also learning the same things. By asking questions, answering questions, receiving help, and writing about what I learned (which required me to think further on the subject), within a few short months, I was able to fully absorb and make the content part of who I was.
My intention with this blog is the same - that I will first of all write about what I'm learning in programming, second of all solidify what I'm learning, and third go through this huge stack of programming content I have already purchased just waiting for me to do. My intention is to sharpen my developer skills daily and hopefully share the journey with some others. It's currently the 11th of June, 2022 as I start this, and I'm eager to see where this journal blogging takes me as a developer!