welson.net

My journey into the tech industry officially began in 2019 when I enrolled in Hack Reactor, a coding bootcamp in Austin, Texas. From there, I was fortunate to be accepted as a REACH Apprentice Software Engineer at LinkedIn. I worked as an Apprentice for approximately one year, at which point I was promoted to a Software Engineer and then subseuqently promoted to my current role as a Senior Engineer a year and a half later. My work centers on LinkedIn’s main feed, where I work on a talented team of client and API engineers and help build accessible, delightful user experiences.

I had developed an interest in tech as a young child which grew over time. As a student at Williams College, I majored in Political Science but in the spirit of liberal arts took classes in history, Spanish, literature, art history, mathematics, and more. In my senior year, I took an introductory class in Computer Science. The curriculum focused on Python with a focus on working with data. I carried this knowledge of scripting and data analysis into my first job as a Business Analyst at a small Vermont-based EdTech startup. This gave me an opportunity to write code to process vendor data and create internal dashboards. This encouraged me to learn more, prompting me to enroll in Hack Reactor.

I grew up in a wonderful, close-knit small city called Northampton, Massachusetts. After attending local public schools from elementary and middle school, I attended high school at The Williston Northampton School in the nearby town of Easthampton, MA. Williston is a small, private, boarding school that I attended as a day student. Williston showed me how much I value learning in small communities, which prompted me to narrow my college search to smaller liberal arts colleges, ultimately leading me to Williams College.

At Williams, I majored in Polticial Science. I spent my junior year studying abroad through the Williams-Exter Programme at Oxford University, which was my first time outside of the United States or Canada (and my first time flying on an airplane!), where I took classes in politics, philosophy, and other topics. After undergrad, I moved to Middlebury, Vermont. While living in Middlebury, I worked for an EdTech startup and a green energy company and also began freelancing as an editor and educational consultant. My time in Middlebury concluded when I decided to start at Hack Reactor and moved to Austin, TX. I lived in Austin for approximately six months before moving to the Bay Area to start at LinkedIn in December 2019.

Currently, I live in the South Bay with my partner and our two cats, Nori and Kimchi. Outside of work, I enjoy pursuing hobby projects like this, cooking and baking, trying restaurants, building mechanical keyboards, playing video and tabletop games, reading, and spending time outside.