Dear Hiring Manager,
Forty-plus GitHub stars and two merged community pull requests came from a tool I built for myself, an algorithm visualizer in TypeScript and HTML5 Canvas that animates quicksort, merge sort, Dijkstra, and A*. I am Naomi Blackwood, finishing a B.S. in Computer Science at UC Davis this May with a 3.6 GPA, coding day to day in Java, Python, and JavaScript. I implemented each algorithm from scratch, with step controls and adjustable input size, so I could see my own Big-O reasoning move on the screen. I get to know a system by rebuilding its parts until I understand the trade-offs, not just the syntax, and that is the habit I would bring to Tidegate Systems.
Last summer at Meridian Labs I shipped three REST endpoints in Java and Spring Boot for an internal analytics tool, with pagination and input validation that two downstream teams now depend on. I raised JUnit coverage on my module from 61 to 90 percent and wired those tests into the GitHub Actions pipeline so failing tests block merges. When a code review flagged a SQL N+1 query, I added an index and a single batched query and cut a dashboard load from 3.2 seconds to under 700ms. For my capstone I led a four-person team building a React and Node.js study scheduler on Render with a PostgreSQL backend, where I owned the REST API, the database schema, and JWT auth with bcrypt hashing.
I hold the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and the Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 8 credential, and the repositories behind my projects are public and documented for anyone who inherits them. If it is useful, I can send a short write-up of one design call from the visualizer repo, why I structured the algorithm interface the way I did and what I would change now. Otherwise, tell me a few times that work on your end and I will put a call on the calendar to talk through how I would approach a Tidegate problem.