Dream Big

Built through experience

I’ve traveled to over 30 different countries, set foot on 5 continents, sailed across two oceans, crossed the equator and the international date line, missed all the signs pointing to where I should go professionally and still made it here somehow!

I love being able to build something and watch it come to life. I’m a logic-minded creative type that loves a good challenge and solving problems. I can quickly pick up new skills and technologies and found that I have a passion for process improvement and automation. I’ve always had a thing for coding and no matter what path I took away from it, I always seemed to come back around.

It all started with building personal pages on Geocities and Angelfire as a teenager. After six years in the Navy I decided to start up a business with a friend, during which time I taught myself graphic design and web development. Eventually I veered off into the realm of business, earned two bachelor's degrees in business, got certified as a Project Management Professional and went into project planning and analyst roles. While in these roles I quickly noticed that some of my work could be automated so I taught myself VBA and began writing macros for Excel and MS Project. After a while I wanted to start automating even more tasks such as processing and analyzing data along with report generation. I picked up VB.net and wrote a couple of Windows applications that ended up allowing several development teams to better analyze and allocate their resources, greatly improving their project planning accuracy.

After getting a Master’s in Management Information Systems I looked at getting into a more technical analyst role with systems analysis but lacked experience in Python. Finally I decided to take the leap from the business side to programming and enrolled in a Python bootcamp at Coding Dojo. I’ve had enough experience with front-end and back-end development that I can honestly say I enjoy both but really love back-end development because of my drive for process improvement. My strongest coding languages are Python, Django, SQL, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and JQuery. I’m also experienced with AJAX, APIs, VB.net and G-Code (CNC programming... yes, I have a wood carving robot).