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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta></meta>
<title>Gabrielle Gustilo</title>
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<a href="#"><img src="../icons/previous_arrow_inverted.png" class="previous-arrow" alt="Previous"></a>
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<main class="main">
<p>Hey!</p>
<p>Thanks for visiting my website. As you might have guessed, my name is Gabrielle Gustilo. I am a yoga enthusiast, cat lover, obscene-amounts-of-tea drinker, and full stack web developer. I have special fondness for Ruby, Javascript, Sass-y CSS, and SQL.</p>
<p>Born and raised all over the US and abroad (I'm looking at you, Philippines), I moved to Chicago for college and have lived in the Windy City for the past 8 years. At the University of Chicago, I studied international relations, with a focus on international security, and Russian. I spent my junior year+ living in St. Petersburg and Moscow.</p>
<p>After college, I bummed about for a year - working in a bakery, as a security guard at a museum, as an au pair, as a freelance editor, copy writer, and thesis advisor, among other things... eventually falling into legal marketing. I worked in legal marketing for three years in two very diverse, hands-on roles. Advertising designer, digital marketer, website administrator, database manager, business strategist, vendor contract negotiator, etc. etc. - I was a person with many hats, to use the oft-overused business jargon. All those hats weren't quite enough for me, though (I've always been more of a shoe person actually; one might say I actually loathe hats), and I also maintained several side projects. For a while, I worked with a friend on a food/art/event startup that eventually tanked when she moved to NY to work for an auction house. I dabbled in blogging - mostly on the topics of international relations and public policy. I also worked as a freelance marketing consultant and web designer/developer for non-profits.</p>
<p>After two and a half years, I was wrapping up a major year-long project rebranding my then-employer and rebuilding their website with a contract web development team. I was surprised to find that - despite the hair-pulling experience of trying to rebrand an entire company and manage the rebuilding of a website with only a two person team, of which only one half was very tech savvy (yes, me) - I was really sad to see the project end. I loved working on that website, and I loved the process of building something that turned out so well.</p>
<p>Thus, the realization dawned that I wasn't very happy as a legal marketer, despite being relatively good at it. I enjoyed the frenetic pace and the variety of work involved, but I wasn't building anything, I wasn't creating much (despite corporate advertising, which is a soul-sucking job), and I wasn't satisfied. I also wasn't quite satisfied with my side projects as a freelance web developer. My creativity was constricted using platforms like Wordpress and Squarespace (lovely platforms that they are), but I didn't quite know how to build things from scratch. So, I started messing around on Codecademy, then got a subscription to Treehouse. I saved up some money and quit my job in May 2015, and traveled for a summer. Finally, I enrolled at Dev Bootcamp for Fall 2015.</p>
<p>My route to web development was winding - full of stops and starts and doubts. Always the creative, wordy, bookwormish type, the idea that I could be a programmer was outlandish at first. It took over two years for the possibility to fully sink in. Yet, slowly but surely, it all started to click.</p>
<p>The process of building a website or web application IS creative, and it actually requires exactly the kind of persnicketty, hard-to-please, detail-oriented-but-big-picture-obsessed mindset that I thrive in. Plus, the satisfaction of finding and eradicating some annoying bug in one's program is simply excellent. Such triumph! And thankfully, my marketing, project management, business strategy, and design skills turned out to still be useful in the computer world. Contextualizing a coding project is incredibly important, because programmers don't work in a vacuum (usually), and it's good to be able to articulate mission, vision, and value propositions even as a web developer.</p>
<p>All in all, I finally feel like I've stumbled upon 'it', at least for a little while. My plan for the next few years is to be yoga-doing, tea-drinking, cat-serving, code-producing BEAST. So, you know, watch out world. :)</p>
<p>Fun fact about me: I was homeschooled from third grade through high school, although I also attended community college my 'senior' year. Also, I make really good muffins.</p>
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