Speaking of the best people and products in technology, here’s a quick (and interesting!) intro to 2020 Noonie Nominee, Shannon Crabill from United State, who’s been nominated in the Technology categories.

1. Which 2020 Noonie have you been nominated for?

Ruby on Rails Thinker of the Year

2. Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a developer, currently working in email development. Outside of my job, I enjoy building fun web apps using CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails and documentation. My background is in graphic design, but I taught myself to code to stay competitive in a saturated job market and haven’t stopped coding since. I love experimenting with front-end technologies while knowing enough about the backend to be dangerous.

3. Tell us about the things you make / write / manage / build.

Right now, I’m having fun building games with HTML, CSS and Javascript on the frontend and Ruby on Rails on the backend. My favorite project at the moment is Food or Foe, an emoji match game, where you have to correctly guess if a given emoji is a food emoji or not, within a 30 second round. I’m working on converting the backend to host it remotely so that the game can be played in the browser in addition to locally. Food or Foe was built with React on the frontend and Ruby on Rails as the backend API.

I’ve been making an effort to write more about what I am learning, what I am building, and sharing that with the world. I’d like to do a recap of building my Food or Foe project, the challenges I encountered with timing and rendering game elements and managing state

I’ve contributed a Vaporwave CSS theme to Style Stage, a modern take on CSS Zen Garden, and plan to share my design process, and how to recreate the elements I used on my blog.

4. What are you most excited about right now?

I’m digging CSS and SVG animations right now!

5. What are you worried about right now?

That our leaders are not taking the pandemic seriously causing unnecessary deaths and crippling the economy in the process.

6. What’s the most useful advice you’ve ever given somebody?

That if something isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist. Seriously, writing documentation doesn’t have to be a big, drawn out thing. Write stuff down, share the mental load, and share the knowledge with your team, company or the internet.

7. How has the pandemic changed your life and/or career?

Not directly. I worked remotely, full time for a year, prior to COVID-19, so my day-to-day did not change. I am thankful to still be employed, full time during the pandemic. At the same time, the stress of the pandemic, uncertain future and financial stability has made it more difficult to focus on work, life and everything in between.

8. If we gave you $10 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it?

Forgiving student loan or medical debt.

9. What’s an opinion you have that most people don’t agree with?

That Beyonce is ok.

10. Which apps can’t you live without?

Other than an internet browser, I find Grammarly saving my butt from spelling myself on a daily basis.

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