Welcome to our Meet ShareProgress series! Once a week, we’ll be posting a quick profile on a member of the ShareProgress staff. This week it’s Justine Lam, our Web Developer.

1. Where do you live? What do you love about it?
   San Francisco (Potrero Hill). I love the amazing views all around the city, seeing the Golden Gate bridge, the skyline, all the water around us. It’s a beautiful city to live in.
2. What do you do at ShareProgress?
   I work on web development and some data science projects.
3. What work were you doing before this that prepared you for your role here?
   I’ve held 5-6 different roles and 5 different industries. My journey has been windy but has followed my interests in making a bigger impact on the world either in policy, politics or through technology. Working at ShareProgress is the perfect melding of these interests. 🙂
4. What’s your favorite part of working at ShareProgress?
   I love our culture and our team. There’s a lot of trust and openness at ShareProgress. We share company and personal goals on a weekly basis, we track our goals all the time and give each other high-fives when we reach them.
   Also, we are always experimenting with fun ways to connect with each other as a team since some of our members are remote( i.e., a fun robot game to practice ideas of programming.)
5. What’s one piece of advice you would give to a beginner web developer?
   When I was starting to learn web development I remember feeling overwhelmed with all the choices of what I could learn (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Angular, Node). The best advice that I got was to just start with web development (front-end) since it’s easiest to start learning and building sites with HTML/CSS and some JavaScript (JS). Also find an apprenticeship or internship where you can get feedback on your code to help you progress, but if you have your own passion project that motivates you to build, work on that.
   My favorite online resources to get started are:
   – Team Treehouse (referral link) $25/month
   – CodeAcademy (free)
   Finally, to practice your JS skills, you can start creating bookmarklets with our Bookmarklet Generator. Here’s a blog post “There’s a Bookmarklet for That!” explaining how useful and powerful they are and how to create one yourself.
6. What’s your favorite thing on the internet right now?
   Something I like to read on the internets: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen

Have you used Treehouse or CodeAcademy? Let us know in the comments! And watch for the more staff profiles in the weeks to come.