As a former chef I highly value ownership, collaboration, client-oriented development, innovation, and continual learning. I strive for excellence in all I do and expect my code to be scalable, testable and maintainable. I take responsibility for my work, both the good and the ugly. I love collaborating with amazing people to create something grand and truly believe success as a team is the most rewarding form of success in the work space. Some of my fondest memories with coworkers are when together we overcame challenges and came out the other end triumphant. Innovating to make a job easier or more efficient is the name of the game in both tech and the kitchen and believe it pays dividends to be innovative. There is always more to learn and room to master ones craft. I'm teachable and plan to stay that way.While the phrase "clean code" has been used fairly liberally, I recently read a quote, "clean code is easily changeable code" and that really struck home. I'm a big fan of test-driven development (TDD) and how it decouples dependancies within the code and intrinsically creates testable code . While I know TDD doesn't fix all the difficulties in development it has helped me immensely in creating code that is "cleaner", easier to scale and maintain.My time as a chef greatly influenced my appreciation for mastery of fundamentals. This lead me to pursue a path of mastering the fundamentals of software engineer. I found this path at Launch School, an online mastery-based school for software developers. Their rigorous course included timed assessments, interviews, timed projects, and a culminating thesis project on a remote team. While my education has been non-traditional, my time at Launch school has imbued me with a mastery of the fundamentals of OOP, computational thinking, data structures, algorithms, and networking. My culminating thesis project was Tinker, an AWS tool for automating backend deployment with an API layer, PostgreSQL database, and a companion user interface for managing data and the database. I was in charge of designing and creating the frontend user interface which handled database visualization and management. I also integrated our API layer which was a GraphQL-esque API handling the database connection. You can read more about my project here: https://tinker-base.github.io