Marta Kule

Software developer with editorial background

Hello

Hi there!

My name is Marta, and I write code for a living. It wasn’t always like that — in fact coding became my full-time job only in 2018. Long before that, as a teenager, I played around with HTML and CSS, made a few websites, but ultimately decided to study Japanese in university.

It was only after I got an MA in East Asian Studies and worked in publishing that I tried JavaScript, saw the results in my browser, and was instantly hooked.

From 2016 to 2018 I was on fire, working my publishing job during the day, writing code at night, and dreaming of the future when I would be coding during the day and playing video games at night.

As a result, what you see in the “Projects” section below are apps and websites I built while learning programming before 2018. The majority of code I wrote afterwards is now a bunch of green tiles on Github, with the exception of my first (and so far last) Android app, which I built in 2020 while taking CS50.

Enjoy my silly apps! I particularly recommend the meowing keyboard, proven to draw cats' attention.

Projects

My First Android App

The video is a demo of my final project for CS50 - the famous Harvard Intro to Computer Science online course. I highly recommend the course to any self-taught programmer. It was a blast!

Android App Demo Video A screenshot of an Android phone simulator on a laptop, showing my cat sound keyboard app

React Recipe Search

I made my first React app while at Bridge School, before I learned Redux, so it relies on component state. Functional programing aside, the highlight for me was adding an orange slice for the loader.

React Recipe Search A screenshot of the web app showing a banner with a simple salad drawing, title 'Recipe Search', a search bar, and the top of the list of results

Marta's JavaScript 30

Wes Bos's JavaScript 30 is a challenge in writing everything in pure JS, with preference for ES6. To keep up the challenge, I built my landing page without libraries as well, including the menu and routing.

Marta's JavaScript 30 A screenshot showing the web app with a set of keys that clicked or keyed play cat meows

Stupid Hackathon

Fun trumped programming at Toronto's 2017 Stupid Hackathon, where my brother (full-stack dev) and I came up with a truly useless wireless string telephone. He made the videos, I made the website.

Stupid Hackathon A screenshot of the website banner, showing the logo, a cup-and-string phone with the string cut, text 'No strings attached: wireless cup'n'strings phone' on the background of people partying with red solo cups in hand

Photo Research

This simple website was my playground for fixed backgrounds. Since I needed content, I wrote an article about best practices in selecting photos for textbook illustrations.

Photo Research A screenshot of the website title banner, showing text 'Photo research in publishing by Marta Kule', and in the background a photo of a table with old sepia photos acattered around a cup of coffee

Programmed Poem

A poet friend asked if I could write a poem in code. I built a choose-your-own-adventure poem with jQuery. I was going for an old terminal feel, but you actually have to click.

Programmed Poem A screenshots of the first three levels of the poem, where the first node leads to only one next node, but the second one leads to two nodes to choose from. The nodes are black rectangles with a glowing green border and glowing green text, on the background of a couple looking up at the night sky.

Sortable Paragraphs

When I worked in a publishing house, I was building interactive exercises that students would use with their textbooks. Here I used jQuery UI for a drag'n'drop paragraph sorting activity.

Sortable Paragraphs A screenshot of the app: the heading reads 'Sortable paragraph', and below is a set of rectangles with sentences - the ones in the wrong order are red and the others green. Below that is the original unscrabled paragraph.

Bar Chart

Thinking of data visualization without using a separate library, I came up with an animated bar chart made out of divs: the values to be shown become the bars' percentage widths.

Bar Chart A screenshot of the app: the heading reads 'Your Results', and below is the chart. On Y axis are 4 values named 'Value One' and so on. On the X axis are numbers from 0 to 100 displayed every 25. The bars show different percentage values.