Product-minded frontend engineer with a love for design. Building community systems and experiences at Vercel

Illustrated portrait of Maya Avendaño smiling and making a peace sign

Welcome to my little corner of the internet! I love creating things that feel useful, delightful and human-considered. My work has lived somewhere between engineering, design, and people.

I'm a builder at heart. I spent 4+ years in the world of startups building in engineering teams, mainly with Svelte. Most recently I was a founding senior frontend engineer, building product at the 0 → 1 stage.

I started my career in a different field of engineering, in the rail industry! 4 years later, along came the first lockdown in 2020... I got curious and started to learn how to code. I spent every day for #100DaysOfCode following Angela Yu's Udemy course, and learning on the nights and weekends. I fell in love with being able to create things on the web for myself and other humans, and the rest is history.

I'm a collector of curiosities ~ I love tinkering with side projects and experiments, and I train and compete across different sports. I'm a kickboxer on a journey to black belt (2 more belts to go!), a figure skater, and an olympic weightlifter. Here's what makes me human.

I'm a cat momma of two ( Illustrated portrait of Churro, a calico cat and Illustrated portrait of Toast, a Siamese cat). Here are some things I love.

Talk at Design Engineering Nights: “Design is emotional & other creative beliefs”

Let's be friends