Who I am

Hello! I’m Matthew Tao, an aspiring front-end developer currently studying Computer Science at the University of Auckland.

My first encounter with code was at the age of thirteen when I signed up for a coding club at my school. We were taught the fundamentals of programming with a programming language called Scratch.

I liked the idea of creating something completely original and being able to translate an idea into something more concrete, and I started to code in my free time as a hobby. This is when I wrote (more like drag and drop) the worst code in my life.

If only I knew what a function was...

I drew a lot as a kid because I loved art and design. I clearly remember this three-month period where I was absolutely obsessed with designing logos and watched hours and hours of YouTube videos covering them.

I think my love for web development has been a natural follow-on from these two interests. I get to bash my head against a problem until it gives while trying to make pleasing designs.

Technologies I’ve used

Languages

Next on my list is to learn a functional-focused language such as F# to pick up some of the paradigms and expand the number of tools I have for any given problem.

Frameworks

Most of the time, I use React frameworks. Funnily enough, the main reason for this is simply because of one library - Framer Motion. I’m comfortable with the fundamentals of websites (HTTPS, Forms, Responses, vanilla HTML, CSS, etc.) I’m confident that I can pick up and adapt to pretty much any framework.

Most comfortable with Remix currently as it’s got the nicest co-location I’ve seen. I’m hoping to look into SvelteKit more, especially once Svelte 5.0 is out since I’ve heard that a new animation API will be included, more similar to Framer Motion!