Early life
I was born in Elkhart, Indiana and lived there up until the point that I graduated high school. I then went to Lake Land College for two years where I played for their mens tennis team and got my Associate's degree in Web Technology. After that I went to Purdue Univeristy for 2 years where I got my Bachelor's degree in Computer Graphics Technology with a focus in interactive media. In my free time I enjoy staying active, mostly soccer and tennis, hanging out with friends, checking out new restaurants, and drinking craft beer.
Early Career
Throughout college I had multiple internships over the summers as either a web developer or web designer. My first real job started 2 weeks before I graduated in May of 2010. I started working for a company in Texas for a two month contact remotely from Indiana. After a month and a half I was asked to come on full time and move down to Texas. I moved to Fort Worth, TX in July of 2010 and started working for the Balcom Agency as a web developer.
When I first got hired on at the Balcom agency, I was one of three developers with the company. During the first 2 years with the company the other 2 developers left the company and during the latter two years I was the only developer. While the people and company are great, the work was starting to get a bit repetitive and I wanted to work with a team of developers again. So after four years of working at the Balcom Agency, I left the company in May of 2014 and started working for Warren Douglas Advertising.
One of the main reasons I began working at Warren Douglas was because they had five other developers there and I was excited to be able to learn from my fellow coworkers. For the first eight or so months of working at Warren Douglas, we were having issues with the project management on our digital projects and so I offered to become the digital project manager. During my time as digital project manager, I got my Certified Scrum Master (CSM) in February of 2016.
Between January of 2016 to April of 2016 our development team went from six members to three members due to various reasons and after a year as digital project manager, Warren Douglas had requested that I take on a new role of senior project developer to help out more on the development side than the project management side. I worked as a senior project developer at Warren Douglas until March of 2017.
Mid Career
In May of 2017 I moved to Austin, TX for my next position as a Ruby on Rails developer. The company was called Senior Advisor and was owned by a parent company called A Place for Mom. Both of these companies were in the nursing home placement marker and had pricing, reviews, pictures, and details on various nursing homes across the country. My role was to build out new API endpoints for various microservices that the front end team used to display the data on the page to the user. This usually required pulling the data from different microservice API endpoints and consolidating that into the format needed by the front end. Because SEO was was vital to success, speed was always the priority so caching responses, using Redis, and checking to see if data was stale was also required. Unfortunately, due to a falling out amoung some of the leadership at the company, the remote office in Austin ended up closing and I moved on to my next role.
In April of 2018, I started a new position as Senior Full Stack Developer at SourceDay. It was a SaaS startup in the supply chain industry. The main purpose of the site was to give full visability to both the buyer and supplier into the state of the purchase orders. We did this by building integrations into varions Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools. At first, we only supported a few ERPs and a few versions of those ERPs. As we grew, we needed to support more ERPs, more versions of said ERPs, as well as handle various client customizations and how you can set up the ERP can vary wildly. Because of my prior experience of working with APIs, I begin to gravitate more toward this work than the features or front end work that our end users would end up engaging with. Eventually the amount of work needed for new clients became too large for me to handle alone and in November of 2019 I was promoted to the Platform and Integration Dev Lead and begun to build out a team of engineers to assist me.
For the first couple years, we didn't have a product person so I would create the tickets and work with the team to get the work completed. I was initially on the calls with consultants and occasionally on sales calls to answer more technical questions. We eventually grew to a point where we onboarded an implementation manager and product person so that I could focus on managing my team and the code.