Once upon a time, in another life, I was a biochemist. I worked with worms, which everyone pictures as earthworms, but really I worked with much smaller roundworms called C. elegans. After leaving graduate school with a master's degree, I quickly discovered that basically no one actually makes money studying tiny nematodes. So, after a few years, I taught myself to code. Coding, like laboratory science, involves a lot of trial-and-error as well as a good ability to troubleshoot, and it turns out there's a decent overlap of skills. So now I'm a front-end web developer, working primary with Angular.

Why Angular? Well, like most thing in the business world, I inherited the code base and it was someone else's idea to put it in Angular. After over two years in this project, however, I've learned a lot about Angular and best practices. I've overhauled the file structure, normalized the stylesheets, and converted them to SCSS. I've upgraded from Angular 4 to Angular 6 to Angular 8, with the attendant headaches upgrading npm packages. I've added Angular Material elements, rolled a custom material theme, and written custom form validation directives. All in addition to the usual feature adds and layout cleanups that come with any front-end project in long-term maintenence.