"As I looked up into the sky, and saw the moon, I knew, in that night, while training for the 2010 Chicago Marathon, that with enough work, all things were possible."
While the Front-end is my go to skill set, I am constantly learning and willing to dive into any and all programming languages. I began my career doing search engine optimization, and although I learned much about SEO, I found I loved coding more. In that first full-time role out of college, I transferred from the marketing department to tech and began utilizing more advanced Javascript, Java and PHP. In the following four years I have worked with everything from Objective-C, C, Java, Ruby, Node and .Net at agencies both small and large.
While the languages may change, the skill of approaching problems is cross-language, and this has allowed me to pick up languages quickly and efficiently.
In conjunction with a local artist, Andrea Burke, I developed a responsive site for local Chicago musician, Seth Boustead. By leveraging Bootstrap and Wordpress, I was able to rapidly create a functional and beautiful site that is still being used by Seth today.
I have been a professional web developer since 2010 and have been interested in computers for far longer. Since the age of three, I can remember having had access to a strange little device that was called the Atari. From that point forward, games fueled my love for problem solving and drove me toward where I am today.
Beyond web development, I also channel my passions into running. On October 2010, I completed the Chicago Marathon. Similar to programming, running requires deep mental concentration and patience. Without these skills, the mind wanders and falls victim to the body's pleas for the end of over-stimulation. Running is a way to unwind as well, and games also serve that function for me.
Games have been a life-long hobby of mine as well, paving the way for development. This past-time also feeds back into programming itself. A favorite game of mine, Magic: The Gathering, has a concept of a stack in-game, and it requires logic to utilize effectively. So, you can say that, after a day of solving problems, I enjoy going home to solve more problems.