I’ll admit it: I’m a math person. I’ve always loved riddles, patterns and problem-solving. My favorite card game by far is Set. You know, the pattern recognition one, red purple and green? I’m obsessed. (As a teacher, I even shamelessly offered bonus points based on class Set-tournament victories.) There’s something so satisfying about the simultaneous fluidity and rigidity of the pattern structure. A strict logic determines what “counts;” and yet within this set of rules, myriad possibilities abound. You could search by color; strategically count the singles, doubles, and triples; eyeball the diamonds or the squiggles alone. Sometimes, though, it’s a matter of throwing out the recognized ‘rules’ and strategies, abandoning rote mental sorting, taking the plunge to imagine the pieces coming together in an entirely new way. My years as a high school mathematics teacher only deepened my passion for problem-solving -- for finding the narrative within numbers. So perhaps it comes as no surprise that when I finally wrote that first “Hello, world” program, a spark ignited in me. Always, I challenged my students to go beyond memorization, to take risks, embrace mistakes. Programming demands the same mindset of me, and it’s a challenge I relish. Now I’m the one who gets to try novel approaches and learn from unexpected outcomes, all the while seeking to find simplicity amidst seeming chaos and to craft the most elegant and incisive solutions. My skills and specialties so far include web development with Ruby on Rails, Python, JavaScript, React/Redux, HTML and CSS, SQL and Postgres... I’m currently working to master C# more fully. Strong demonstrated history of critical thinking, flexible analysis, and analytical writing. I bring a love of logic, an impulse toward creativity, and the strong conviction that code can drive social change.