Experienced software engineer with a proven track record in high-growth environments, specializing in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and database management, adept at leading teams and more.

I’ve always been interested in building (and taking things apart) ever since a young age. LEGO is probably a pretty reasonable starting point, as I am sure many of us have experienced. There’s nothing really that compares to the feeling of seeing something in your imagination and making it come to life in the physical (or virtual) world. The entire process of iteration, trying new things and observing the results were quite formative to my development when I was starting life. 

It’s been a goal of mine to never let that spark of curiosity die, fortunately I’ve been successful in the mission to continue approaching problems with the same curious intuition that drove me to try and figure out how and why something worked the way it did. No toy was safe, or anything really - I never limited my scope of “take this apart and figure out how it works” to toys. My dad (who is quite adept at figuring out how things work as well) helped foster and encourage that behavior - all sorts of electronic kits to poke at, observe, tinker with and most importantly - learn.

I didn’t realize then in my pre-teen years that I was building a solid foundation to place a career on top of, I doubt I recognized that until much later, but before I realized that - a new “toy” had to come into my life. I was about the age of 10 or so when we finally got - the family computer. Immediately my world had changed, sure there were video games to play, but most interesting to me was the idea that I could create things on the computer. Between the early internet and the idea that I could create things to put onto “the internet” to share with others - I quickly became consumed by the idea of building things for the internet.

As my career developed I eventually found Ruby on Rails and had my world completely changed, this was very early Ruby on Rails 3.0 and it was a breath of fresh air. The idea of covering common use cases and pitfalls out of the box and the idea of convention over configuration really clicked well with me. I was blown away with how effective we could be as a small team shipping features with Rails and Ruby. Ruby is a beautiful, readable language that is a dream to write code in. By contrast at the time PHP code felt archaic and messy. It was all in on Ruby on Rails for me.

Throughout my career I’ve made a point to be proficient at being able to go between the technical side and the business side - whenever you’re developing software for a business you have to understand the business to keep the two sides aligned and heading in the same direction. I can help the business understand the benefits of technical initiatives and I can turn it around and put on my “business” hat when making decisions about the implementations.