Marichka Offen

This was the all-in sprint where I learned full-stack dev from scratch. Long days, lots of projects, hundreds of "why is this broken" moments. It gave me the foundation for everything I do now, from UI architecture to thinking about user experience.

Freelancing was my crash course in "do everything." I coded small sites, talked directly with clients, translated their aesthetic preferences into actual UI, and wrote docs so they could maintain things after I handed it off. It pushed me to develop my own taste, my own workflow, and honestly a lot of my independence as an engineer.

Worked on internal tools used by more than a thousand people, so if I broke something, everyone knew instantly. Built pages, fixed performance issues, cleaned up old code, and made workflow apps less painful for employees. This job taught me a lot about listening—someone would say "this workflow makes no sense," and I'd dig in, make it cleaner, and ship something that made their daily life easier.

Built actual product: reusable Vue 3 components, pages, workflows, and helped shape an in-house design system that people actually used. A lot of my role was translating "complex data orchestration idea" into "a UI that doesn't scare users away." I teamed up constantly with designers and PMs, wrote onboarding docs that made new hires sigh with relief, and somehow became the person who could deliver work twice as fast because I asked good questions up front.

Basically lived in the world of Shopify, Vue, and "why is this Liquid code doing that?" Spent most days building components, fixing weird production bugs, and turning Figma files into real, responsive UI without making the designers cry. I was also the person who would say "hold on, something feels off," then dig three layers deep through Liquid → JS → SCSS to find the real root of the problem.