My Tech Journey

Hi! Laud here.

How it Started

Applying tech to solving problems and making decisions has always been a passion of mine. Mostly because I come from a place (Ghana) where 'data literacy' and tech adoption are still largely in their infancy. So when I joined Studio Ten Four (STF) as an intern back in 2014, my interests ranged from web development to what I playfully call 'data wrangling'.

My Time at Studio Ten Four

At STF, I went from intern to contractor to part time to full time employee and eventually running the business. Being a Full Stack Web Developer at a small agency means you get to wear many different hats on any given day. This allowed me to polish many skills, such as project management, customer relations and business communications.

In 2016, I got a chance to spread my wings a little when moz.com offered me a 3-month contract position on their Front End Engineering team. The exposure to the 'corporate tech world' did me good. Three months turned into 7, and I learned a ton. For example, Jira, sprints, scrum, daily stand ups and GitHub issues. Moz offered to extend my contract. However, I had some family issues to attend to in Ghana. This meant I had to wrap things up at Moz earlier than I would have wished.

Running Studio Ten Four

In early 2017, around the same time as I left for Ghana, things got even more exciting. My boss, Tim Ganter, decided to give up the agency life and take up a research role at Adobe. He offered me the opportunity to take over the day-to-day at STF, and I accepted the challenge. Now I had even more hats to wear, including marketing, invoicing and billing, support, writing proposals to bid on contracts and coordinating with contractors to deliver these jobs and more. While working remotely during my Ghana trip, I became a full time STF employee and have been locked into 'growth mode' ever since.

Also during this time, we were pondering the idea of pivoting STF into a data science company. So upon my return to Seattle, I took a semester of Python Programming at the University of Washington as a way of dipping my toes into the world of data science. I also completed a course in MongoDB databases, learned ReactJs, Docker, Strapi, TailwindCSS, Nodejs, AWS and Laravel, among many other technologies. However, it was Laravel that was to prove the most intrumental in shaping my interest in backend development.

Once again, in 2019, I left Seattle for Ghana to spend some time with my family. A need arose at the local Methodist Church for an application that would help them organize the church and surrounding communities for social causes and more. Solving real-life problems with code is what I live for, so I got to thinking... this seemed like a job for Laravel!

At the time, I only had one Laravel app in my portfolio, the STF website. I had been looking for a project on which to hone my programming skills in general, especially on the backend. This is how MethodistCRM came about.

Read about MethodistCRM here.

What's next?

Right now, I'm looking for an opportunity to grow my career and learn new things. Sadly, this means it's time to move on from my role at Studio Ten Four. So first, I need to get a job. After that, I would like to continue improving this project. I already have a to-do list. If you have suggestions, feedback, or if you'd like to log in and checkout the staging site, or want to hire me =) drop me a line at [email protected].

UPDATE:

I got a job! Currently working at Salesforce as a Software Engineer on the Tableau Marketing Engineering team.

Thanks for reading!

- Laud