Rails Developer with a past life as a Project Manager

I began my journey as a software developer by quitting my job as a Mechanical Engineering Project Manager in the commercial HVAC construction world to teach myself how to code. I decided to move to South America where I spent my weekdays locked in my room teaching myself to build RESTful apps with Ruby on Rails backends and React frontends.

I then moved back to the States, settling in Austin, Texas, where I got my first professional Software Engineering gig as a full-stack software engineer for Moove-it, an engineering consultancy specializing in fast and beautiful applications to help companies get a leg up in their respective industries. There I worked on a handful of different projects interfacing directly with the customers, working on agile teams to build frontend applications with React, Angular, Typescript, and other technologies. I also worked with Node.js to build some small internal projects.

After my time with Moove-it, an opportunity arose to work with a fantastic engineering company called Hatched Labs where I worked primarily on the backend grocery API built in Ruby on Rails. I spent about 4 years helping to launch, maintain, and build new revenue-increasing features for the Giant Eagle grocery store chain's online shopping and delivery application. Giant Eagle boasts upwards of 211 stores across 5 states in the northwest United States. We built their exclusive shopping platform from 0 to over $500 Million in annual revenue through our application. We also went from 0 to over 400K monthly active users.

Throughout this journey, the values I have learned to prioritize in my work and in the environments I seek out are:

• Learning and teaching mindset
• Doing things right IS doing them faster (in the long run)
• Diversity drives quality
• Always start from the customer's perspective and work back from there

I think that engineers and companies that prioritize these things make better products because we are always improving ourselves, raising the ceiling of what is possible, minimizing our mistakes, increasing efficiency, and ultimately, meeting needs with innovative solutions.

When these things are happening, I get really excited because it creates a sense of drive and purpose that is much more fulfilling (and fun!) than just completing a task for the sake of the task.

This is how my path has shaped me as an engineer so far and I am incredibly excited to start the next chapter with a motivated team that likes to build cool things together and hopefully make the world a little bit better, one line of code at a time.