Vaz Allen

I'm a developer with over 10 years of experience in full-stack web development, and I worked professionally as a mentor for 4 years helping hundreds of students at Lighthouse Labs, one of the leading web dev bootcamps in Canada, aiding them with everything from programming fundamentals to planning, implementing and debugging complex final projects.

I'm an expert in the art of dropping in to help on a tricky problem in progress, with a codebase and often frameworks, libraries or APIs I've never used before, and providing the right mix of guidance (both technical and tactical—teaching how one can go about getting unstuck now and in the future), tutoring, exploring together the code or the various documentations, or teaching important debugging skills.

If you're working on learning, whether you're new to coding altogether or you're adding a new skill, I can help you work through demo projects, brush up on coding concepts, or define your own goals so you can learn the skills you need for whatever you want to do. I'm open to taking on more long-term mentees!

I'm especially interested in front-end app development, web APIs (both implementing endpoints—i.e.servers—and integrating with existing APIs). I'm knowledgeable about functional programming styles and concepts, as well as how some of those concepts can be used to improve some imperative code.

I can help you with your dev tools and workflow, and get more from your commandline, editor, REPL, and tests. I also have a deep understanding of git and can help untangle you when you think you really messed up your git repo (you probably didn't).

Feel free to send me a message!