I'm Amanda Romero. I live in Albuquerque, where I write backend code and occasionally remember to touch the frontend.
I've been writing PHP for 20 years and playing guitar for closer to 30; if you ask me to shred a solo, I'll disappoint you on both counts. I started guitar at age 5 and I'm still, happily, not a virtuoso. Most of my practice time goes into stealing licks from guitarists who very much are, and slowly getting them under my fingers. Lately that's meant building out an ampless rig; I run straight into an interface and get a tone that still feels like a real amp is sitting in the room. It's a strange kind of magic that a decade ago would've sounded like a compromise, and now just sounds like guitar.
On the backend, I live mostly in PHP and Laravel, with some time in Mezzio and a lot of freelance and open source work under my own shop, Builtnoble. It's part portfolio, part junk drawer of things I've built for clients that turned out to be useful enough to open source; that, full disclosure, usually takes me longer than it should. I'm my own harshest critic, and there's a gap between "this works" and "this is good enough for other people to see" that I have to actively push through every time.
One thing I am sure of: one of the things I'm proudest of professionally is leading composer package development at Shopgenie; it was a small team with a big impact on how the API was structured, and it's still a focus of my freelance work today, Laravel or not.
If you want to see me get genuinely worked up about something low-stakes, ask me about tabs vs. spaces. A senior dev once told me hard tabs use fewer bits than soft tabs. He's not wrong. He's also talking about PHP — an interpreted language — like we're rationing bytes on a 1980s mainframe. I will die on this hill.
When I'm not writing code, I'm probably deep in an RPG with a game world too big to responsibly finish; Cyberpunk 2077's my most-played by a wide margin, and I've got a soft spot for sci-fi worlds like No Man's Sky too. Give me a massive map and questionable time management and I'm set. I'd be remiss not to mention Ark: Survival Evolved, which quietly ate an entire summer of my life a few years back; I went in thinking "I'll just tame one dinosaur" and emerged months later having built a base, a taming strategy, and several regrets about my sleep schedule.