“I see a woman may be made a fool, if she had not a spirit to resist.”
— Taming of the Shrew
I sat at the high kitchen table that had become a kind of permanent emergency workstation — a laptop, three half-charged devices, and a stack of papers related to a financing deadline for my mom’s small-business loan. About a month earlier, the U.S. government had shut down. The future felt suspended in midair. National Parks, federal workers, even the military: all caught in the political crossfire. As news about layoffs and tariff battles flickered across my screen, I tried not to hunch over the trackpad like a Dickensian clerk.
I pulled off one headphone cup — my compromise between focus and daughterly awareness. My mom and I were sharing a temporary apartment while she tried to close on the property and I was trying to figure out my next role in marketing or content strategy. She became more upset as the shutdown dragged on, threatening to delay the closing. I couldn’t fix Congress, so I focused on the only thing I could control: her website.
The site had become my unofficial return-to-programming boot camp. A month earlier I’d started experimenting with AI coding assistants, fully expecting the usual lazy nonsense. Instead, I got surprisingly coherent snippets I could shape into real functionality. My coding origin story had been a handful of Raspberry Pi experiments back in college, the kind of “humanities student with a soldering iron” phase that burns out quickly. CSS and HTML kept me afloat in marketing work, but I’d always assumed JavaScript was a kind of destiny I wasn’t meant for.
Yet here I was in 2025, clocking real hours and feeling a suspiciously genuine sense of progress. The AI augmentation wasn’t replacing me — it was accelerating all the parts of my brain that were already good at design, layout, UX, and structure. Suddenly “vibe coding” felt less like a joke and more like a superpower.
So there I sat, trying not to notice my mom pacing, feeling like I’d entered the second
“Charles Dickens moment” of my thirties. I was Bob Cratchit with noise-cancelling headphones — one eye on a failing government, the other on a deadline. This Dickens novel came with JavaScript, not soot.
Reenacting Community During the Pandemic
In 2021, I enrolled in four freshman-level app and web programming courses at Salt Lake Community College — all held in the charming and historical East High building on 2100 South. It felt vaguely illicit to be a grown woman sitting through Intro to Web Dev in a classroom designed for teenagers, but I was determined to give programming a real shot.
At the same time, I was watching Community on repeat and skiing Solitude, Snowbird, and Brighton with the focus of someone trying to stabilize her nervous system through elevation. Coding gave me structure; skiing gave me oxygen; Community gave me a vocabulary for coping with a world that felt like a sitcom gone wrong.
During that twilight first year, when masking was cultural performance art and no one could agree on how dangerous anything was, I balanced skiing and coding with a job at a bookstore/warehouse hybrid that functioned like a dragon’s hoard. My boss, “Deborah,” the CFO of her son’s construction company, had discovered Amazon’s “lost inventory” liquidation pallets and became an enthusiastic collector. If a supplier failed to pay their invoice, Amazon seized their goods. Deborah bought the seized goods by the truckload.
The warehouse was full of books — 250,000+ books, by my last count. Over a year and a half, I worked with a developer to conceptualize and build a custom app that pulled in metadata through API calls to auto-fill listings. I also built an automated email and rewards program, because nothing strengthens your technical fortitude like trying to categorize thousands of paperback romance novels written between 1983 and 1997.
That job, chaotic as it was, gave me a technical foundation I didn’t realize I was building. It funded the down payment for my first condo and gave me the kind of programming confidence that only comes from solving daily puzzles. Near the end of my time there, when another employee joked to Deborah that I was the real owner and operator of her business — she just had a shopping addiction — I knew she would never forgive it; the sentence hung in the air like a verdict, and I understood the shift in our relationship instantly.
After nine months of house-hunting, I found a two-bedroom top-floor unit in Holladay. The layout was clean, the windows large, and the fireplace beautifully vintage. I made an offer within 24 hours, a decisiveness I didn’t know I possessed.
Aix La Chapelle, the condo complex, sat tucked under the Wasatch. Every night I walked my dog beneath the old trees and looked up at Mount Olympus when the sun hit it just right — the granite turning pink, the ridgeline glowing like a blushing heart. The mountain top has a similar shape as the Ficus religiosa, the sacred tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment.
“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.”
— Taming of the Shrew
Never Let a Debbie Get You Down
Not to sound like Cinderella, but the bookshop job where I learned app integration and inventory/marketing automation was brutal. My contributions seemed to slide into the background, becoming part of the invisible machinery that made everything run. The truth was simple: I had put in the hours. I had built systems. I had wrestled with pipelines, automation, and UX problems that made my eyes cross. But then, as now in the new “vibe coding era,” people didn’t want to acknowledge I might be more valuable than a Marketing Manager.
By the time I was sitting at that kitchen table debugging mom’s contact form, the programming part wasn’t the hard thing anymore. Life was. And for better or worse, I had already learned to keep going — through shutdowns, ski seasons, book avalanches, and more I won’t bore you with. The website I built for my mom, the one that began on that kitchen table, now lives here:
https://beasleysboarding.com