I’m Nick Parrish. I live in Virginia and love to code.

My entire life, I've loved creating things. Building things out of raw materials puts me into a power state of flow and I lose myself for hours on end. For me, the gateway drug was the 20lb plastic box of Lego's I had as a child. Thanks to my incredibly smart father, my love for design and creation blossomed into more permanent media. Wood-working, metal working, and pottery of all things soon became my media of choice.

While living at home, and using my family's shops was awesome, eventually I had to go off to college. I ultimately decided to move far from home and pursue an engineering degree. This was my first exposure to software, in the form of 3D modeling/drafting software, and data analysis via Matlab. From there I was hooked. My urge to create was not being satisfied at school, as I no longer had access to the expensive equipment necessary to do so with physical media. Then I discovered code.

I began my self-study to code by reading books on Objective C and tinkering with iOS apps. I steadily moved on more data-science related languages like Matlab and Python, and ended up getting pretty good at python. While delving into the world of data science I became proficient manipulating datasets with Pandas and NumPy. I eventually discovereda course on machine learning and trained a couple of neural networks of my own using Keras and Tensorflow.

For 10 years I stiff-armed jumping into the web development world as it never really excited me. Boy was that stupid. I eventually took a course on basic HTML and had a blast with its simplicity and flexibility. That morphed into learning vanilla JavaScript, using it with React, and building SPAs with a Firebase back-end. Finally, while working on a project for someone else, I was forced to learn Angular, which was what got me hooked on TypeScript and type-safe languages in general. I almost feel a sense of unease when using JavaScript now; once you go type-safe, you never go back!

Today, I am a confident full-stack dev. What started as a hobby has paid the bills from time to time, but has come full-circle. I'm back to coding, but on my terms and for myself. I work on projects that I want to work on, and absolutely love doing so. Coding is still something I enjoy doing. Hopefully one of my apps will take off some day... stay tuned for more!