Fast load times and lag‑free interactions are my highest priority. Bug‑free websites are the way to go.
Designing intuitive and mobile responsive e‑mails and websites create excellent user experiences. Let me help you bring your UI/UX dreams to life.
My dynamic personality keeps me humble as both an educator and as a student. Always. I'm open to learning new technical skills in order to get the job done well.
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Valerie has always had a knack for helping others through kindness, compassion, and humor. Her empathetic approaches combined with her admiration for the resilent women in her family led Valerie to pursue a career in education. Valerie earned her Bachelors in Education from the University of North Texas, as well as a Masters in Curriculum and Instruction from Sam Houston State Unversity.
After teaching ESL at the elementary level for several incredibly challenging years, Valerie was inspired by a former colleague to try teaching overseas. Sooner rather later, Valerie boarded a plane to the United Arab Emirates, where she taught English to kindergarteners in Al Ain, Abu Dhabi for three years. In those years, Valerie truly began to spread her wings and widen her outlook on life through her travels to Kenya, Sri Lanka, Qatar, Oman, Amsterdam, Ireland, United Kingdom, just to name a few. While teaching overseas, Valerie discovered that while she was an excellent educator, she was actually more interested in teaching the students computer skills and assisting her colleagues with technology‑related inquiries.
At the end of her third year of teaching overseas, Valerie decided to follow her interest in technology, but this time, outside of the classroom. She parted ways with Abu Dhabi (but not before an amazing trip to Ireland) and moved back to Houston, Texas to see her beloved family and friends. She also had to confess to them that she would be home only for the summer, as she decided to study coding at the New York Code + Design Academy in the heart of NYC. Her transition to NYC came as a shock to some, and eye rolls from others. Regardless, Valerie knew herself well enough to know that teaching children for a living no longer sparked joy in her heart. Her transition into tech was mostly happenstance, and based purely on hope, faith, and some coins she'd saved up while teaching abroad.
After completing her Web Development Intensive Course, Valerie honed her skills in HTML/CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, Photoshop and Wordpress. She did not get her biggest opportunity until August 2018, where she took on the role as an Email Marketing Design Developer at Getty Images. As an Email Developer, Valerie built, tested and deployed large scale email campaigns using softwares such as Eloqua and Email on Acid.
At the start of 2020, Valerie joined the non-profit organization Partnership to End Addiction, where she codes, designs, optimizes, tests, schedules and deploys advocacy and resource email campaigns. In this position Valerie also manages email campaign data that encompasses open rates, click-through rates, hard/soft bounce rates, email deliverability, donation data and Google Analytics UTM tracking data. The soft skills she used as a teacher like empathy, compassion, patience, collaboration, leading, and life‑long learning also come in handy as she navigates the tech industry.