Allison K. Williams

Just a few words about me

It is time I am honest with you: I am a nerd 🤓. I love to learn new things. I am a sit-in-the-front-row-question-asker for life. I love exploring big ideas and paying attention to minute details. Software development checks both these boxes: each letter, each semi-colon, each curly bracket matters when building a rich website.

I also love to be on the front lines of change. Creating good applications is a moving target and we have new tools to use daily (hourly?) as we code. The developer world is wide and diverse, I love that innovation matters.

And I believe that all work and play is done better alongside other human beings. Writing functional code is one thing, but writing and debugging code that endures for others to improve upon... that is the craft. My favorite professional accomplishments cannot be separated from the people I worked alongside.

Years of working experience

Full-Stack sites built

450

GitHub commits

Or, to put it another way:

Imagine you and I are teammates playing basketball in a loud, hot gym. You just made a clutch play that prevented the other team from scoring which led to our team sinking a three pointer from the corner (Great job, by the way!), which then led to the other team to call a timeout because we just took the lead.

My absolute favorite part of that scenario would be getting back to the bench to celebrate as a team and coaching staff because of what WE had just accomplished.

I like working with people. Also, I like basketball, and grilling, and shoes, and music.

The Coding Boot Camp at UNC-Chapel Hill

Out of sheer curiosity, I started to teach myself to code about two years ago. I experimented with learning online and then landed at UNC's Coding Bootcamp. This six month course was a blaze of new concepts and due dates as I worked my way from HTML basics to the MERN (Mongo-Express-React-Node) full stack model in an insanely short amount of time. The curriculum provided opportunities to code every day. It was intense but I had a blast. To quote a friend, I "didn't sign up for Coding Resort Camp, [I] signed up for Coding Bootcamp".

Randolph-Macon College

I earned a BA from this great little spot near Richmond, Virginia. I graduated with Honors, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and played basketball all four years. I studied English and Religion there and managed to celebrate with my teammates and coaches on the bench many times along the way. Randolph-Macon set me on course for my first career, as I got connected to the non-profit while on campus there which would then employ me for the next thirteen years.

Wineries, Air Jordan 5s, Rap, & the Printing Press

Perhaps better discussed in person, contact me! these are some of my favorite metaphors for why I connect with computer programming. I'll choose one for now, ask me about the others later. There is a winery in Burgundy, France (a region known for wine excellence) that lives by the motto:

"Maximum work in the vineyards, for minimum intervention in the cuverie".

Grapes are grown in the vineyards and the cuverie is where grape juice ferments and eventually becomes wine. Wine-making is an arduous, tricky process that results in art. Like coding, there is steady work involved and the better one plans and thinks through details early on, the less one will need to mess with the final product.