Leonard P. Soai-Van

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About Me

Does the work you do improve an individual's experience with a service or a product?

That question has been the basis of my work and education, starting in social services. As an advocate for a range of social issues (e.g., homelessness, mental illness, domestic violence), I've always viewed my primary responsibility as being a bridge between individuals/families and the services they need. My day-to-day goal has always been to improve access to those services, as well as to improve a client's experience while accessing those services.

As I look to take on programming and development in a full-time capacity, I am seeing endless parallels. There is always an opportunity, somewhere, to do something better for someone. It could be writing better queries, so that a user gets to her results faster. It could be writing cleaner, better-tested code, so that a teammate has an easier time reviewing and maintaining what I've written. It could be making sure that a button on a form isn't just properly aligned, but is designed in a specific way that accurately conveys marking and branding initiatives.

Whatever the case may be, I am always looking for an opportunity to take my abilities to a higher level. During my free time, you'll often find me on The Odin Project's Gitter, moderating and assisting our students, on Udemy, or, in general, on my laptop, working through personal projects with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, RSpec/Capybara, and Javascript. I've recently gone full swan-dive into Vue.js, and am really loving it!

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Projects

Below you'll find some of my earlier, non-representative (but fun!) projects I've worked on. Feel free to hop on over to my GitHub profile for more recent projects.