Hey, I'm Tania!

I made my first websites in the late '90s on the public library's dial-up internet - fan pages about Digimon, gaming, and obscure '80s bands.

Somehow, I ended up taking a decade-long detour getting a culinary degree (including three months at Olive Garden school in Italy) and being a professional chef (including a stint at Namco's Pac-Man restaurant).

Eventually I found my way back, starting over as an unpaid intern making WordPress sites, working my way through the industry (including being a Taco Bell dev) and becoming the Principal Software Engineer I am today.

Meanwhile, I've documented everything I learned since I started in 2015, in 177 posts, 40+ articles written for other publications, dozens of open-source projects with 20,000+ stars on GitHub, and some art, songs, and personal thoughts scattered around.

As ever, this site has no ads, no paywalls, no tracking, and no sponsors.

Learn from scratch

Every time I learned something new, I tried to write the guide I wished I had. Understanding how the command line works, how the DOM works, the fundamentals of CSS, and using APIs were all game changers for me.

Design for Developers

Introduction to the Command Line

Introduction to the DOM

How to Connect to an API

How to Use React

Deep dives

All Topics

As my work became more advanced, I became more interested in documenting the process, authorization and authentication, data-driven design, build tools, architecture, and more.

React Application Architecture

CSS Concepts and Fundamentals

OAuth with PKCE

Data-Driven Forms

ECharts for Data Visualization

Event Loop, Callbacks, Promises, and Async

Bits, Bytes, and Bases

Under the hood

Although it's not always necessary to reinvent the wheel, I like taking things apart to understand how they work.

Chip-8 Emulator From Scratch

MVC Application From Scratch

Building TakeNote

Sokoban Game From Scratch

Off the clock

On a rare occasion, things of interest make it on the site that aren't just about coding, which expresses some of my other interests: building a PC for gaming, documenting the deep lore of Animorphs, and making an online accordion. (That one might be coding-adjacent.)

The Lore of Animorphs