Hello. I haven't blogged in over a month. I took a break for the holidays, and then poof January is almost over!

With the new year, I mostly just want to properly introduce myself on here, share a little bit more about my journey to tech. I know I have a couple of previous blogs about graphic design, but I wanted to do a clean slate with this blog.

I am a freelance web developer. I'm really enjoying working with clients and building websites. I don't think I've talked too much about my pre-developer life - I am a fiction writer, I spent 10 years as a writer and then was a fiction manuscript editor for a small publisher. I spent a lot of time working with other creative people and stories. My love affair with stories runs back to the beginning, reading is still my all-time favorite pastime. My professional experience is my authority and target audience - I work with artists, designers, any creative people to make sites and help turn their creative vision into an online presence. Covid really changed my direction in life, I didn't start off as someone who wanted to be in tech.

Pre-covid, I was on a hiatus from writing, I still had a couple of freelance editing clients but mostly I had switched into medical laboratory science. I had switched gears when Trump was inaugurated in 2016 and he started gutting government science jobs and censoring scientific data. In 2016, I was working at a veterinary clinic as an assistant, learning a lot about veterinary medicine and I felt like I had to do my part. Medical lab technicians are the people who run the tests when you go to get your blood drawn at the doctor. I had actively avoided science and math my whole life, in my undergrad I took an oceanography class to get out my math requirement.

By 2020, I was 1 semester shy of rotations when covid hit and I had to move last June, and I can't get a job in a lab without passing the licensing board (need to finish school to do that). I had learned a ton about statistical analysis (it's used a lot in measuring reference values for tests, to compare against the sample data), utilizing curiosity with scientific theory to solve problems in the lab, we did diagnostic studies on hypothetical patients using symptoms and the data run on samples.

I'm not gonna apologize for geeking out, science is cool. It turned out that doing stuff in the lab is pretty similar to coding - you know whether or not what you did worked because your test will tell you. If it doesn't work, you have to figure out what went wrong and fix it.

Studying laboratory science was the first place I heard about coding, I met a young woman in my program who was learning to code to work in laboratory research. I started trying out the Grasshopper app. Once I moved, I started learning more about what else coding could do beyond needing it for science software, the creative potential seemed endless! It also picked my brain on a curiosity level, to investigate. Creativity and tech seemed to go hand in hand in this world. It felt like my weird path had finally found a home in an industry.

So, once I started building my client base this winter, I didn't realized how much I missed being around other creative people. So I started seeking out other creatives in tech - artists who also code, UX'ers, artists who express themselves through a digital media. And the funny thing is that once I started talking to other creatives and looking sites for market analysis for client work, I realized that a website is just an interactive, multimedia narrative. It has more technical components behind the scenes, certainly. It's just that the narrative isn't a novel for the reader to follow, where it begins and ends with the plot structure. On a website, the narrative a user is meant to see is the story of your site, your business, your nonprofit. Or on mobile, where it's even more succinct and every word choice matters, every button, anything the user is meant to interact with - it defines the narrative you tell. How well that story is told will solidify if a potential user will become a customer. That narrative can be bigger than the page they look at - it's the marketing narrative, how their friends and family found this site or app, etc. But it all plays a role.

I never thought much about it in a bigger picture until I got to tech, but now I can't seem to stop thinking about scientific storytelling. It turned out that storytelling is a very important thing in tech. Data scientists use storytelling understand the data they're looking at. Research is understood by looking at the bigger picture of the narrative. The people who make decisions need to understand how this information affects people. But it's done by connecting humans to other humans through storytelling, through understanding from their perspective. Storytelling is one of the things I think that make us human. The process of understanding what a user needs, that is a science, too, but storytelling is used to convey the information - UX Research. I found that so fascinating that I started doing a Coursera specialization.

Creativity is used every day in tech to solve problems, and it's something I'm looking to highlight more of, going forward. I'm definitely learning the more I experience the tech industry, knowing how to do things is good, knowing a programming language is great - but you know what's really important? Asking why. Wondering how the pieces fit together. Science and creativity share something in common - curiosity - and we should use it more.

Once you ask all the questions and go down the different paths to find the answers, the next part is - how do you look at that solution (or potential solutions)? Storytelling is just the overarching narrative, just like building a website is bigger than language you code in. That website you work on helps people in their day to day lives. We are so dependent on websites in society, all the more reason it's more important than ever for the content to be utilize the narrative to get whatever information you're trying to get across.

The most important starting place is to ask "why?" and daydream. It's good to wonder, to imagine.