Dan Lay

a little about me

Hi there, I'm Dan Lay and I’m a software engineer and a violinist / violist.

I have been a musician ever since I was 4 years old, and my love for it naturally morphed into a love of music-making and performance technologies. I received a full-tuition scholarship to Berklee College of Music, have performed with a multitude of orchestral / chamber outfits around the world, been a part of many critically acclaimed albums as a studio recording artist, and have won a number of prestigious awards and competitions.

After Covid hit, I began an online course to learn the basics of Python, and then took the plunge and attended a 4-month intensive bootcamp at App Academy in Manhattan. There, I learned to code in Ruby and Javascript, and utilized React, Rails, PostgreSQL, and many other technologies to manipulate databases and build out functional full stack applications.

I'm currently learning Python and Rust in order to bring more of my ideas into the fold, I compose sad techno on the daily, and I would love to hear from you, so please reach out!

Check out my resume here

code creations

current skills

Ruby Ruby on Rails PostgreSQL SQLite3 Javascript jQuery CSS3 HTML5 MongoDB Mongoose React Redux Express Node.js Tone.js Web Audio API Canvas API AWS Git Github Heroku Railway.app Rspec Capybara GIMP Rust

I began my coding journey in the 2022 App Academy cohort in New York, learning languages like Ruby and Javascript, frameworks like Rails as a backend, and technologies such as React, MongoDB, Redux, and a whole bunch of CSS. CSS was my weakpoint starting out, and so I dove deep to try and understand what was going on, and I worked my way from the frontend to the backend. I can happily say now I know a couple things, but there's so much more to learn and figure out, and that excites me.

Here are some of my projects thus far:

stepSeq  

stepSeq was my very first project, and in order to build this single-page vanilla JS app, I utilized class and view structures, a lot of document.getElementByClassname, and a neat library called tone.js. Currently, you can play preloaded samples, and as they loop, you can manipulate their sounds with effects faders on the fly. In the future, I wish to implement custom sample recording, and maybe experiment with cuboids in the CSS structure, for an even more realistic feel. I hope you have fun with it!

BooTube  

BooTube is a YouTube clone that utilizes a Ruby on Rails / PostgreSQL backend hooked up to a frontend built with React for easy component structuring and Redux to help manage state. This was by far the most challenging of my first three projects, as I learned all the intricacies of Ruby on Rails along with setting up AWS for media storage, translating the ruby code so that the JS frontend could understand it, and familiarizing myself with what a good flat state looks like.

Rising Sign  

Rising Sign is my first project acting in the capacity of Frontend Lead along with 3 of my spectacular peers. CSS was still a sort of black box to me, and so I spent long hours trying to understand what exactly *position* did and how to come up with nice animations. If I could start again I would definitely restructure the way I set up my components and have a better CSS property layout. Most likely I'll end up doing that anyway.

musical meandering

More to come soon!

Get in Touch!

• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Elements

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while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
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    i++;
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print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';