# Education I studied at Texas State University, receiving a BFA Communication Design -- not your typical Software Engineer's degree. Self-taught, I spent a lot of my career embarrassed of my degree, and worrying about everything I hadn't known to teach myself that I would have gotten for free with a BS. Ultimately, that hasn't really mattered. If anything, I'd suggest more engineers pursue some sort of formal communication training, _especially_ in the WFH era. A key component to working in this industry is making yourself understood. And as a visual thinker, I can't help but see that *visual communication* is _crucial_ to conveying the heavily-technical concepts I've needed to sell ideas to stakeholders an support and grow a teams of engineers. # History I've been building websites for money since 2013. I started my career at McGarrah Jessee, an advertising agency in Austin known for building cult brands. I was a part of a team of two developers that built banner ads, marketing emails, contest websites, from-scratch CMSs, and countless brochure sites, from the JQuery era through to the React Era. We used Rails, Backbone/Marionette, and more. Working at an agency is a great way for a developer to get to wear lots of hats, touch a lot of technology, and try a lot of techniques out. Tight deadlines teach you to focus and be efficient and that there is sometimes no room for error. Clients keep you on your toes, and being on the client-service end of things where "No" and "that would take too long and you want to launch tomorrow" aren't options teaches you problem-solving skills like no other environment I've encountered. Working at McJ specifically drilled in to me an attention to detail and a pursuit of uncompromisingly perfect digital experiences. Once you've had a designer lay their design over a screenshot of your site in "difference" mode in Photoshop, it changes you. I left McJ in 2020 when they decided to focus on print, and went to work at Springbox, a B2B agency that was effectively next-door. The team there was similarly-sized, but let me get my first taste of engineering leadership, managing teams of contractors overseas. This was another high-intensity, high-performance agency where I continued pulling rabbits out of hats at the 11th hour. In 2021, I got the opportunity to move product-side and come work at Storable. I was wearying of the cycle of building sites from scratch and releasing them into the wild, never to be seen again, and wanted the experience of maintaining something long-term, and at a much larger scale. I started on the Marketplace (aka Sparefoot) product as a Senior Software Engineer, and took the Technical Lead role about 6 months in. On the Marketplace team, I got to dramatically grow my leadership experience, heading a team of local and off-shore developers for a multi-million-dollar-a-month product. When I joined, Sparefoot was just beginning its journey from a mature, successful startup product into being part of an enterprise software company. Armed with my experience in tight-deadline, high-consequence client-service, I'm extremely proud of the work that I've done on this team, formalizing and maturing the product technically and procedurally. As the team matured to be more self-sufficient and I had engineers I could rely on to run the day-to-day work of the team, I found myself collaborating more with other products, taking on company-wide projects like our internal Design System; the Council that governs and maintains the design system; contributing to our company-wide Javascript developer education group; and giving talks on FE technologies and concepts to other groups. As my role expanded outside of _just_ my product, I was promoted to Staff Engineer. I still contribute heavily to Marketplace, as my heart is stuck with this particular product, and act as Software Architect for the product, involved in planning and designing high-level technical strategy for the product, often several Qs ahead of time. # Technical Leadership I most often wear the technical leadership hat, finding myself gluing disparate parts of teams and products together to lead them to a successful outcome. I'm an eager and successful collaborator with our partners in Product, and will always have a soft spot for Product Design from my agency days. I care deeply about mentoring and growing the skills of teams of engineers. Be it individual technical and personal skills or meta-team habits, getting teams to work efficiently, productively, and happily is the most rewarding part of my job. I'm extremely familiar with working in a Scrum Agile fashion, including leading standups, BRPs, and other ceremonies. We follow Domain-Driven Design principles, and I recently began running Event Storming workshops. # Technical Skills The longer I've been an engineer, the better I've come to understand that the essence of being an engineer is figuring out how to solve problems. As engineers change jobs and situations, they become particularly quick in solving problems in particular domains, with particular tools. We usually say those are the languages we use, but at the end of the day, any engineer's engineer will jump at the chance to solve a new problem in a new language. I started as a Front-End engineer, but now consider myself a Full-Stack engineer. The products I've worked on have included server-side rendered SEO-heavy front ends backed by RESTful Node and highly Object-Oriented PHP microservices. These are deployed onto an EKS cluster. ## Front End, TS, React, Next.JS That said, I'm generally working in **Typescript** and **React**. **Front End development** is my specialty, and as soon as I list that I'm generally building with **Next.JS** and **Tailwind** these days, something new will come out. ## Back End, PHP, Node, SQL My product is PHP-heavy, (with some Node middleware mixed in) and so I'm also proficient with PHP, SQL and other related technologies. Nobody wants to talk about it, but PHP still rules. ## DevOps, CI/CD, AWS I'm often my products de facto DevOps guy, and am a confident and steady hand working with Docker, K8S, Helm, and Gitlab CI/CD pipelines. I have extensive experience with AWS tools including EKS, ECR, S3, SES, RDS, R53, and others. I'm preparing to take the Cloud Architect Associate exam. I'm also familiar and proficient with Cloudflare.