Work Experience

FULL STACK DEVELOPER

February 2019 - Present

Since February 2019, I've been having fun building custom wagtail blocks at the Motley Fool, where I get to tackle interesting challenges with a great team. I love diving into complex problems – like creating financial calculators that help people make smarter money decisions. One of my first tools was a Balance Transfer calculator that uses Vue.js to help folks figure out whether transferring credit card debt or getting a personal loan would save them more money. It's a nice companion to the debt snowball calculator and mortgage tools that I also helped build.

 Looking back, one of my early wins was creating automated content filters (kind of like WordPress shortcodes) that cut manual updates by 60% - that was about four years ago, and it's still making everyone's life easier! Around three years ago, I participated in a major push to strengthen our testing practices, helping our team to take our coverage from 32% to 89%. It's satisfying to build things that not only work well now but stay reliable over time.

Just this past year, I've been deep in the weeds with JavaScript linters, making sure our code stays clean and consistent. And this last quarter, I wrapped up an exciting project integrating Cloudflare turnstile tokens and email validation – not the flashiest work, but it's the kind of behind-the-scenes magic that keeps our users' data safe and our systems running smoothly.

What keeps me energized is how there's always something new to learn. When you're passionate about coding, every challenge becomes an opportunity to grow. The best part? Seeing how our tools make a real difference – we've grown our affiliate program from $1M to $30M in five years! 

BOOTCAMP MENTOR

February 2021 - June 2024

For about three years, I had the privilege of mentoring aspiring developers at Code Institute. I intentionally kept my student load to 10 or less at a time as I wanted to give each person the attention they deserved while maintaining my performance as a full-time developer. The approach paid off – I achieved a 90% project completion rate for the students who actively engaged with me, but more importantly, I got to help people overcome real-life challenges in their journey to become developers.

What I loved most was seeing my students make that leap from 'I don't know if I can do this' to launching their first applications. Whether it was helping them tackle tricky deployment issues, build confidence in debugging, or navigate database problems, every challenge they conquered also gave me a dopamine hit of success. It was especially rewarding to receive feedback and thank you notes about transitioning from previous jobs like dishwashing and retail into their first programming roles.

Teaching others made me a better developer too. Creating debugging guides and best practices checklists for students and mentors helped me organize my thinking about development challenges and reaffirmed that sharing knowledge often teaches you as much as it helps others.

FRONT END AGILE TEAM LEAD

May 2014 - February 2019

In 2014 I was hand picked to be part of CenturyLink’s pilot agile team. Over the last four years I was with Centurylink, I implemented redesigns to make online ordering flows responsive utilizing bootstrap. I helped transition a series of pages from jQuery to AngularJS. I was the subject matter expert for implementing Adobe Analytics and Live Engage third party includes to CenturyLink’s residential ordering flows. I helped establish reliable JavaScript and CSS optimization across a distributed website with distinct development, test and production areas where files might be in a different state per environment despite a shared content code base via Shell scripts and cron jobs. While I strongly dislike the quirks of IE, I took the time verify that my solutions looked up to snuff in that browser along with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. I also dabbled in web accessibility verification and automated testing as part of this team. 

LEAD UI DEVELOPER 

November 2005 - May 2014

I began my journey into website development with an internal transfer in late 2005. I first worked with a Stellent content based management system where I learned how to build custom objects so our business partners could update promotional content on the fly without code releases or interactions with developers. I started with old school table HTML, learning on the fly. Through the years I helped setup a home grown content system using Dimensions and Apache Velocity to render dynamic content for online internet and phone ordering. I forced the business to move on from button imagery and to rely upon CSS3 as an effort to reduce page sizes and maintence cost for branding overhauls post mergers. I also lead the effort to update our websites to HTML5 and oversaw the first mobile redesign for a set of static internet help pages. I lead several offshore based fast change teams over this 9 year period.

INTERACTIVE VOICE RESPONSE DEVELOPER 

September 1999- November 2005

My journey with CenturyLink really started with USWest, I survived the Qwest Communications and CenturyLink mergers as well as many acquisitions. I was part of a REFIT program where the objective was to Retrain Engineers For Information Technologies. I went through formal coding, database, and networking classes offered at Arapaho Community College and the University of Denver while working 3 days a week with a development team. I was placed with the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) team where I programmed various touch tone queues. I quickly mastered that system and became a lead developer within 6 years despite several hiring and promotional freezes. I was part of the team that transitioned the IVR’s from touch tone technology to speech recognition.  While on the IVR team, I worked on the company’s first #Net application to support the speech recognition platform. One of my crowning achievements on the IVR team was implementing a real time outage message recording routine such that relevant messaging to customers experiencing service outages could be injected on the fly without a code release. I also gained a ton of experience mentoring offshore co-workers and lead an internal phrase transcribing application development. 

GROUNDWATER MODELING GEEK 

May 1997 - September 1999

Once upon a time, I did actually work in the field I spent so many years studying in college.  As  a ground water modeler, the coolest project I did  was to build a user interface to automate reports for various client groups. The reports included statistical data scrubbing, customized charts and aerial plots of average concentrations of chemicals, and beautifully formatted Excel tables using Visual Basic, IDL and SQL queries. This involved integrating with AUTOCAD drawings and setting up user permissions by projects.  I was intimate with Microsoft Access relational databases as I had to design them to store groundwater and contamination levels as well as physical properties of soils based on geographical locations for various client groups and remediation/containment sites. I spent the majority of my time calibrating and developing groundwater models for environmental remediation sites utilizing a variety of 2D and 3D software applications including SWANFLOW, MODFLOW, and MODPATH3. So yeah, I’m a geek at heart.