Hi, I’m Allison.
Where I come from, and how I ended up writing code.
Salon kid.
I moved to the US when I was young. My parents run a nail salon, and they encouraged me to study from early on, but they were never tiger parents about it. They let me wander down whatever my heart wanted.
As a kid, that was oil painting, writing stories, and reading tons of books. I was curious about pretty much everything, so I liked learning, and by high school that meant 16 AP, dual enrollment and IB classes, from Differential Equations to European History.
Why computer science?
When it came time to pick a major, I was torn between UChicago for creative writing and Georgia Tech for computer science. I’d had zero exposure to STEM, but I’d found out about software engineering on my own and it stuck with me.
Why computer science? Honestly, it came down to this: I like designing, building, and bringing ideas to life, and code lets me put what I build in front of a lot more people than a story can.
That was my thinking at the time. Three years in, the answer is simpler. I like hard problems, I learn something new every semester, and the things I’m proudest of, from a first place hackathon project my freshman year to the scheduler I’m building for my parents’ salon, all came from writing code. The writing didn’t go away either. It’s how I write my docs.
From “Hello, world” to first place overall.
Hello, world.
Started computer science at Georgia Tech, never having written a line of code.
First hackathon, first place.
Our team won the educational technology category. I built the frontend and ran the project as PM. The win got us into CreateX, Georgia Tech’s startup accelerator.
Lead TA, CS 2340.
Helped run Georgia Tech’s software engineering course.
Frontend intern, QuantData.
Built pixel-accurate, accessible React and Next.js components for a fintech platform.
HackGT, same friends.
We go back every year with the same group. At HackGT 12 we built TryOn AI.
Software engineering intern, Raymond James.
A summer in Tampa building a Spring Boot bulk-update API, plus an Angular dashboard for watching batch jobs run.
Sky-C2, first place overall.
Our AR app for identifying the planes overhead won first place overall at HackGT 13.
Finishing a scheduler for my parents.
Building the salon app so my mom can finally put down the salon phone.
Graduation, then Asia.
Diploma first, then a very long flight.