For as long as I can remember, I've always been tech-oriented.

I built my first website in 2009 before heading on my first trip abroad. Writing multiple postcards felt inefficient, so I built a travel blog instead to keep my family updated on my adventures. That probably tells you almost everything you need to know about me. I’m also pretty sure I still sent the postcards. I think.

I remember being one of three girls in my entire high school to sign up for the computer science class. I went on to study engineering physics and mechanical engineering at university, where I learned about object-oriented programming through mathematical modelling, which is exactly as nerdy as it sounds and I loved (almost) every second of it

Around the same time, I was navigating a long stretch of health challenges. Chronic conditions, injuries from years of playing sports, and a body that needed more attention than I could give it. I sought out every kind of health practitioner and modality I could find to help me feel better and in doing so fell headfirst into the wellness world.

When I needed to take a leave from university, I found myself working in boutique fitness and wellness spaces across Toronto. I started with energy exchanges — trading my time for access to the services that were helping me heal — and worked my way up through every role, reaching management level across multiple businesses. I've done everything from sitting at the front desk, answering the phones and the emails to managing schedules, all while watching incredibly talented instructors and practitioners do life-changing work that nobody could find. And it was that last part stuck with me. These people were some of the best at what they did, but you would never know it by the scale of their businesses. 

During that time I also built a blog (I know, another one). It started as a way to connect with others going through similar health experiences and share what I was learning. Between the designing, the writing, and the community that formed around it, I fell in love with the whole process, and it confirmed something I already knew on some level: I wanted to build things on the internet for a living. 

When my health finally stabilized, I pivoted away from engineering and into a software development career. I spent years working as a full-stack developer, contributing to websites that average 250,000 daily users and apps now used by over a million people. I gravitated toward front-end work because I am, at heart, a visual person but full-stack work is equally satisfying. And there is nothing cooler, in my humble opinion, than seeing someone interact with something you built.

I remember lying on a treatment table during one of those recovery years and feeling something shift after a single session that I'd been carrying for a long time. And instead of relief, my first thought was disbelief. How does no one know about this person?

And the answer was never about the quality of the work, because the work was exceptional. It was that nobody could find them. That question never really left me, so Rose Coded because the answer to it The gap between doing incredible work and being found by the people who need it most. I speak both languages — I've lived on both sides — and I know exactly what it takes to build the bridge between them.

I'm not an instructor, nor a practitioner. I'll never be the person on the other side of that treatment table. But I've been the client, the co-worker and on the other side of the screen as a developer.

And I built Rose Coded for every incredibly talented person whose website doesn't reflect what they're actually capable of.