Hello, 👋, my name is Sophia Brandt.

I’m a tax officer and polyglot programmer.

I volunteer as a Star Mentor and GitHub team member to the Zero to Mastery community where I help and support fledgling programmers.

When I was a stay-at-home mom, I started teaching myself to code - and I never looked back. 💜

I enjoy React.js, TypeScript, Go, Vim, Docker, mobile development with React Native, learning new programming languages, pen & paper role-playing games, and writing about it.

I’m interested in conflict resolution and trained as a mediator at Fernuniversität Hagen.

Writing

All my coding-related writing is available on https://www.rockyourcode.com.

You can find selected articles on Dev.to as well.

Talks

I gave a talk at the Softwerkskammer Ruhrgebiet about writing type-safe React applications with Reason. This talk stems from my experiences in learning ReasonML in public.

The repository and slides are available on GitHub.

Projects

Go Maybe List

Save links for later

A full-stack Go web application build from scratch - without a web framework.

With this project I was able to learn more about writing production-ready Go services, dependency management and writing SQL queries.

Features:

• custom web service framework/handler to isolate dependencies and improve error handling
• middleware integration
• SQL database support using SQLite (easy to swap out to a different SQL database)
• no ORM, use of Go’s standard database/sql library and jmoiron/sqlx
• user authentication and authorization with sessions
• profile view and change password
• form validation
• use of Docker, Docker Compose, Makefiles
• vendoring dependencies with Modules, requires Go 1.12 or higher
• Admin CLI with boilerplate templates to reduce repetitive copy/pasting.
• responsive HTML and CSS without media queries
• dark and light theme (via prefers-color-scheme)

Live Demo | Source Code

Next.js Ecommerce Shop

Ecommerce shop written in TypeScript/React.js, with Keystone.js as CMS

A full-stack Ecommerce application with incremental static site generation and server-side rendering.

Features:

• Role-based Permissions (only a user with permissions can see “Edit” and “Delete” button for a product and can perform these actions, etc.)
• Debounced Product Search with DownshiftJS
• Incremental Static Site Generation for product pages
• Server-Side Rendering for showing orders and updating products
• Advanced Usage of Apollo Cache for a snappy user experience by manipulating the Apollo Cache with cache.readQuery, cache.writeQuery, cache.modify and cache.evict
• Form Validation with React Hook Form
• Automatic Deployment via Docker Swarm and GitLab CI
• Testing with react-testing-library and Jest

Live Demo | Source Code

Nim URL Shortener

Shorten URLs - like bit.ly or TinyURL

A web application using Nim and Jester. Nim is a statically compiled systems programming language. The app was developed using Docker, Docker Compose, nginx and GitLab CI for continuous integration, testing, and deployment.

I enjoy applying new-found knowledge to practical projects. This URL shortener stemmed from my wish to solidify my programming skills with Nim.

Live Demo | Source Code

Reason Music Player

A browser-based music player written in ReasonReact

Reason is an alternative sytnax for OCaml and allows you to write expressive and 100% type safe code. The app shows how to manage state with the useContext hook.

I was interested in learning ReasonML in 2019. This web application showcases my journey in learning the language and tool-chain in public.

I’ve written a series of blog posts about how to create this app on dev.to:

• How To Create a Music Player in Reason With The useContext Hook Part 1
• How To Create a Music Player in Reason With The useContext Hook Part 2
• How To Create a Music Player in Reason With The useContext Hook Part 3
• How To Create a Music Player in Reason With The useContext Hook Part 4

Live Demo | Source Code