I am from Southern California originally. My name Kimberly actually came from my grandma - it was her idea to name me after a company called Kimberly Clark. Back then, there wasn't an internet, but there was TV shopping and of course TV and radio. She took a liking to the marketing of things and so here I am.

My dad had a successful concrete company in which he was also a cement mason. I remember all of the patterns created by a huge stamp pressed into soft concrete. I am proud that his company did work that included Disneyland as a client and proud to have learned work ethic, respect and business smarts from him. Although dad and grandma have passed,  I can continue to help others as much as I can when it comes to their futures. At this moment of becoming a professional developer, I will appreciate others who are mentors or just those who are able to work with a junior level developer.

As a kid, I remember a time when my family was in the car headed to a family party probably. I'm pretty sure there weren't seat belts at that time, nonetheless there was some traffic. I saw a ticker sign on the side of the road that had information about a hazard or something informative about the traffic. I asked 'how does it know what's ahead?' and my family laughed. I though it was a magical sign. On a side note, I later worked on part of an online ticker during my days at LinkShare/Rakuten. As a kid, my friends and brothers liked Atari and Nintendo. I was amazed with such a thing that could be so fun and creative. I also loved arts & crafts and some outdoor activities like swimming and softball.

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My first real taste of technology happened when I took a Multimedia certificate program at a local college. I learned HTML and particularly the index page. If I remember right, I used tables at that time. I did some freelance work here and there for friends and family - simple sites from scratch.

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MY BACKGROUND

My first job that had impact on me came after getting my Graphic Design AA. (oddly, I got an AA after my BA from UC Santa Cruz in Art History and Economics -double major). I worked at Auto Trader magazine in Southern California. There, I was a layout production person. I enjoyed working with modular sections to form a page layout. The more than 4 years that I worked there were valuable. I learned about professional teamwork, deadlines and dedication. I also met a best friend there. These were times where print was still alive, but I could see the emerging technology. I was able to take on an internship for a small social media company where I got to work on HTML pages within a CMS. -That was a short project but soon after, I was invited to make plans to move to New York!

Once there, I needed a job and I was looking for something similar to Auto Trader yet more online rather than print. At first I took a temporary assignment at an Education company where I worked on HTML bugs. Soon after, I got hired at LinkShare (which is now Rakuten). There I was a Production Specialist with focus on email and landing pages. During my time there I learned soo much. I got to work on some special projects with Developers which included a tool called 'EasyLinks' (I built the front end wrapper, with divs!). I also helped on a ticker (as mentioned before) and a few other projects like building a kiosk-type of playbook that I made from a Dreamweaver widget with Ajax and XML. Back then, there weren't as many ready-made email templates so I made my own. I also made the landing pages to match. I loved spry tabbed widget landing pages and dynamic content in general.

That same job brought me back to the West coast where I am now. I've lived in San Francisco since 2011. I continued to learn B2B and B2C Marketing and worked on many projects during my time at Rakuten. I'm most proud of the responsive email templates. I had researched and learned about media queries and was in charge of sending batch emails to Fortune500 companies.

I thought I had mastered emails, but there was a whole new side of triggered emails and automating that I still had to conquer. My temporary assignment at Esurance was fun yet challenging. I stepped in to a vacated team that was once occupied by 2 email developers. I stepped in and learned and documented the processes of account holder triggered emails and also customer marketing email campaigns. I was lucky to have the foundational email logic in place, so I just needed to work with it. This was an in-house email system that was connected to the backend ticketing system in Jira. I was now in a Release cycle environment. Eventually, I trained the 2 new email developers and moved on to my next project.

I took an opportunity with Citrix (which became GetGo and then acquired by LogMeIn). There, I started as Email Developer. A year later I became a Senior Email Automation Manager. I learned their email platform Marketo quickly and became a certified admin.

Experience at LogMeIn.

Experience at Google Cloud.

Student at BrainStation for Web Development (front and back end). Looking to start my Web Dev career.

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