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laura

Laura Batson

Professional JavaScript Developer

I graduated from Thinkful in 2017 and I’ve been working in tech ever since. Coding is fun! It's solving puzzles and challenging your brain to think in new ways. I'm a full-stack developer with a front-end focus. I've worked at tiny startups with around 20 people in the whole company to CNN, reaching millions of users around the world. I love the fast pace of startups and getting to be a major part of creating a product. At larger companies I love the resources available and getting to meet all kinds of people.

I'm proud to have been a co-director of Women Who Code Atlanta. Even with the closing of Women Who Code Global, I continue to support the tech community in Atlanta and promote the growth and success of underrepresented groups in tech through Refactr.tech. When I'm not on my computer, I'm spending time with my family and making things. I love swimming, crafting, DIY, baking, gardening and am usually in the middle of at least 2 books.


Bootcamp Portfolio

To get a better idea of my current development work, please check out my GitHub account but for some idea of some of my earliest projects from my bootcamp days, I've shared a few images below. These sites were originally hosted as capstone projects on Heroku but are no longer actively deployed so these images are to help give an idea of projects I have sole ownership of.

If you check the weather frequently, you are probably aware of how frustrating and bloated the popular weather websites are. I spend a lot of time outside and I like to be prepared. I decided to build this app to make accessing my basic local weather forecast quick and easy (the default city is even my hometown so it’s extra quick for me!). I utilized the Weather Underground API for my information and the Material UI library to make my UI/UX streamlined.

For my final capstone, I decided to work on a project that could be helpful in my job search. The idea of this is a CRM software app that focuses on networking with contacts. Having one place for contact information, notes about meetings and follow-ups, and sorting and scheduling capabilities help keep your professional network manageable. I’ve included functionality to push followup reminders to a personal calendar. I’ve also implemented secure login functionality. While I currently only have contacts included in this app, I want to add on a job search category that would allow a user to keep their job hunt organized as well.

This was my first official capstone project I completed at bootcamp. After a few false starts where I learned more about APIs and what makes them good to work with, I decided to create a map that helps you find local art galleries to visit wherever you happen to be. I used Google Map’s API for geolocation and Google Places to find information about galleries. To add more to this project, I returned recently and updated the project to include available driving directions to each location.

One of the best ways to become an expert on something you enjoy is to journal about your experiences with it to compare and contrast. This is a well known technique for those who wish to become more knowledgeable about wine. I personally don’t care for wine, but I love tea and my original idea for this project was to create a journal that can be customized to record any experience including tea tastings, wine, and beyond. To keep this project to scale in the limited time I had during bootcamp, I focused on making this a digital diary for tea. I hope to scale the project up in the future to help document all types of experience.