About Me
So you want to know more about me? Alright, here we go!
I’m a full-stack web developer living in Portland, Oregon with my wonderful wife, amazing daughter, and our captive lion adorable cat.
My interest in development started at a young age after being inspired to figure out how the video games I was playing were being created. This led me to start my programming journey with Basic, followed by C and C++ shortly afterwards.
When I had access to the internet in my teen years I learned about HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript by creating some simple web pages where I may have slightly overused the <marquee> tag and frames.
At this time I was also developing a passion for music which led me to Berklee College of Music. My education there was focused in a tech-heavy curriculum, which combined my love of music with technology. I graduated with degrees in Music Production & Engineering and Music Synthesis.
While saving up money to move to Los Angeles to pursue music production work, I built an e-commerce website for my parents business. This was my first significant website and also my introduction to dynamic content by utilizing PHP and MySQL to manage several hundred products through a custom-built CMS.
After moving to Los Angeles, I started working with a post-production director that dealt with recording dialogue for animation and video games. He also had a service called GameCues that was designed to help indie game developers through the music licensing process. Unhappy with the results of outsourced development, we brought development of the service in-house and re-built it from scratch. At it’s peak, the service hosted over a hundred thousand music and sound FX assets that required more than 4TB of storage space. For me, it was a crash course in ingesting and managing that amount of data.
As a result of our work on GameCues, we also took on additional web development work with one of our largest projects being an RV insurance brokerage site where we simplified their quoting form process, resulting in a positive impact on conversion rates.
Eventually, the audio post-production work took precedence and we moved into our own recording studio. At the studio, my development focus shifted from building websites to creating tools and applications designed to automate our workflow and manage projects. My interest in JavaScript was also growing at this time and I was using technologies like Meteor, AngularJS, Electron, and NodeJS in my work.
With a desire to pursue more development work, I moved to Portland and began working with a local design and development agency. While there I continued to improve my PHP and JavaScript skills, putting an emphasis on site performance and the inclusion of emerging web standards and functionality (such as ES2015/ES6 at time time) into our workflow. My experience with data conversions and external systems integrations helped me significantly in this role.
Following my departure from that agency I began my current endeavor of taking on contract development and consulting work. I’ve enjoyed having a direct relationship with my clients and it’s been rewarding being able to leverage my experience to solve their problems in creative ways.
