Writing about myself in any non-trivial capacity has been something I've struggled with, but here goes! I suppose I'd be breaking conventions putting this up top, but the TL;DR of it is: I'm a line cook, turned restaurant manager, turned cloud account executive, turned software engineer!
For the longest time, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do; well, I knew what I wanted to do - fly jets and go fast - but a stint at the US Air Force Academy quickly solidfied that path as a no go (check the glasses!) I spent some time in my early twenties working in restaurants. Cooking has and continues to be a passion of mine, but when the opportunity came to get out of the restaurant industry, I took it and never looked back.
That opportunity came in the form of an account executive role in the cloud space. I had always enjoyed tech, in the "I like gadgets and sci-fi" sense, but seeing the tech industry firsthand really piqued my interest. I started playing around with Bash and doing some basic work with our VPSs during demos and found myself preferring the technical side of the job far more than the sales side.
I left that position after a few years in hopes of starting my own business, but the pandemic hit and those dreams never quite took off. I did, though, manage to finish that bachelor's degree I had started while at the US Air Force Academy! After some soul searching, though, I admitted to myself that business management wasn't the path I wanted to head down. I knew I had a passion for tech, and after some free courses, developed a love for programming. I decided to pursue Software Engineering full time, dropping pretty much everything and enrolled in Launch School.
Over the course of the past couple of years, I've gone from building small, toy command-line applications to creating production ready services to support event-driven architectures, like Triage! Beyond those things, though, Launch School helped me foster a passion for doing things "the long way" - no shortcuts, no "try it and see if it works" coding sessions - a mentality that extends beyond my professional sphere to my family, relationships, and hobbies.
That's about the long and short of my adult life - if you're interested in connecting or learning more about any of my projects, you can get in touch here!