About Me

I remember the iconic moment my dad updated the family PC from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. Of course, back then I was only interested in the color scheme changes and the new features in Paintbrush. I spent hours drawing pictures and saving them to my personal 3.5" floppy disk, which was a beautiful sea green color.

During this time, I also learned to use the Command Prompt and MS-DOS Shell to play games. One of my favorite games was called "Dr. SBAITSO," which was not a game at all but a psychologist simulator. You could ask it questions through text input and have a mock-therapy session, where it would respond verbally with our fancy new sound card. The program didn't have the best pronunciation, and certainly didn't give the best advice, but my family had a lot of fun with the good doctor, testing its limits and patience. We still jokingly mispronounce "mistaken" as he did, "mis-TACK-en."

Thus began my love of programming. The grade school I attended had a relatively new computer lab full of old Apple computers, and my family computer was a PC, so I like to think I got the best of both worlds. The first computer I bought was a PowerMac G4, which I used for music projects and Photoshop, and designed a website for my band. That site, along with the constant desire to have the flashiest MySpace page, taught me my first HTML skills. Luckily, my band's GeoCities page has long since been decommissioned, and MySpace completely changed their format once people stopped using it, so there is no evidence of my past crimes against HTML. I have to say, HTML5 is much easier than previous iterations, and the things we can do with HTML5 combined with CSS and JavaScript make front-end design an entertaining experience.

My real love, though, is back-end development. It's something I've wanted to do since my first experiences with the Microsoft Command Prompt. When I moved across the country for work on the east coast, my first job there involved using IBM AS400-based software with the familiar black screen and green text. I loved how quick the program was, and how you could easily get the program to do what you wanted it to do once you learned the right commands. The company eventually changed over to a full web-based application, which was less pliable but more user-friendly. Learning to use that application was more involved, as navigation was slower and its quirks were harder to overcome. Not to be outdone by the stubborn personality of a modern program, I soon got a new position providing tech support for the application's internal and external users. I wasn't in Development yet, but I worked closely with the Dev team when problems arose, and full-stack development became my goal.

After attending The Tech Academy in 2018, I was hired to their development team as a full-stack developer where I have been working since. We use C# in an ASP.NET MVC application with a React-Redux front end. We also planned the architecture for the next phase of our application using .NET Core microservices containerized with Docker in Azure. Aside from those technologies, I have a huge love for jQuery and the Wild West that is JavaScript. I am always looking to learn new languages and frameworks, most recently having built an app using Angular. See my Portfolio section for details on my learning journey. Cheers!