I'm Elijah Gaytan. Of all the pages on the internet - you stubmled on this one. In any case, thanks for stopping by.
I'm a Software Engineer from Austin, TX. I'm a Full-Stack connoisseur who specializes in creating stunning, user-friendly and scalable Web Applications.
My software development journey started with me doing something entirely different.- game development. I started making games when was 16, and I played around with a lot of different engines, such as RPG Maker and Unity. It was around this time I got introduced by a friend to the insane reality that is Virtual Reality (pun intended). I got offered a contract to work with the city of Austin on an exciting new simulation, and I joined Texas State's VR Club as a founding member.
Our club was wildly successful, and we would go on to host three of the largest hackathons at Texas State. We were hands-on with the club until 2020, until...well, you know what happened.
After I graduated in 2020, I took a break from VR, and ended up falling in love with something different - backend development. I got my first Software Engineering job at PNC, where I worked in Python (for the first time) on developing APIS for a couple of new internal projects and microservices.
At PNC, I got the pleasure of developing across a wide variety of tech stack, from Django / FastAPI and MySQL, to Express.js and MongoDB (the much loved / hated MERN Stack). I got exposed to a wide variety of technologies, and I loved it.
I also got my first taste of professional frontend development. I vividly remember my first professional frontend project - implementing an Audit Table in Vue.js. Needless to say, the code was not pretty, but that's where my love for working on full-stack projects flourished. And the rest is history.