About

How I got here

My first teaching job was at Portland Community College, working as a teaching assistant in a program called Career Pathways. We taught basic computer skills to recent immigrants and refugees. I loved it immediately. The instructor I worked with was great, the students were inspiring, and by the end I was pretty sure I wanted to spend my career in adult education.

So I got a master's degree in it. Then I graduated into the Great Recession and couldn't find a job.

For two years I interned for free at Open Signal (then called Portland Public Media), bringing laptops into organizations like Outside In and local after-school programs to teach teenagers and kids how to make short films. It was some of the most rewarding work I've ever done. Eventually I had to earn a living, so I took a data entry job at a hormone testing lab, affixing barcodes to vials of saliva.

Around that time, I saw a flyer: a company called Treehouse was giving away 10,000 free accounts to learn web development. I signed up, worked through their entire front end program in a summer, got a grant to attend a coding bootcamp, and landed my first tech job nine months after writing my first line of code.

A few months later I saw a job listing at Treehouse. I'd already been going to their meetups and getting to know the people who made the courses. They offered me a contract to build one, then hired me full time. It felt like the thing I'd been working toward without knowing it.

What I think makes learning actually work

Adults need the subject matter to feel relevant. That sounds obvious, but most courses don't do it well.

Relevance can mean a lot of things. When I taught college success courses, it meant connecting material to things students actually cared about. When I design technical courses, it usually means building around practical application. The goal is that learners always know the why, what a concept applies to, how they'll use it in the real world. Engagement follows from that. You can't skip it.

The other thing I keep coming back to is simplicity and repetition. Keep examples short and concrete. Start small and build. Don't mention a concept once and assume it landed. With coding especially, repeat exposure and practice aren't optional. I've watched a lot of courses make the mistake of treating understanding as a checkbox rather than something that accumulates over time.

A bit more

I have a Master's in Postsecondary, Adult, and Continuing Education from Portland State University, and a background in software development across edtech, higher education, and developer tooling platforms.

I live in Portland, Oregon. I go to drag shows, dance at DJ Action Slack's vintage vinyl parties, and spend summers swimming in rivers and soaking at Carson Hot Springs. Portland Community College offers a fake fruit sculpting class that I am determined to take as soon as it isn't full. I own a ukulele and crochet hooks. I genuinely intend to use both again someday.