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🚀 About Me
I am a software engineer based in Saint Paul, MN, with a passion for writing efficient code and fostering team success. With over a decade of professional experience since 2010, I specialize in designing robust architectures, implementing DevOps best practices, and continuously improving my skills. I have a strong commitment to writing high-quality code and collaborating with others to achieve optimal results.
Outside of work, I maintain a small homelab to practice and explore new technologies. I've been using Ansible to manage my infrastructure via the repository
home-playbooks
. Within this infra and among these hosted services, I have deployed custom web apps which are managed by the monorepo:home-web-apps
. These experiences have not only improved my technical skills but also taught me valuable lessons in project management and system scalability.When I'm not at the keyboard, I enjoy connecting with family, playing video games, and cooking. I moved back home to Seattle with my wife Marie in 2016 to be closer to my family and then to Saint Paul, MN, in 2023 to live closer to Marie's family after having two children. In my free time, I love playing factory-simulation games like Satisfactory, Factorio, & Dyson Sphere Program, which fuel my creativity and problem-solving skills. I also enjoy shooters like Call of Duty, Halo, & Battlefield, to stay connected with my hometown friends. Cooking Mexican and Korean cuisine is another passion of mine, as I find joy in sharing great food and connecting with others. At my groom's party just before my wedding, I cooked a Mexican feast for nearly 35 guests - a memorable experience that highlights my love for both cooking and bringing people together.
🌞 Highlights from my Technical Journey
- 2001 - 7th grade computer class - I learned Visual Basic and ASP.NET to build an app to help my computer teacher track coffee sales for his students
- 2010 - Completed a summer internship at the University of Maine working with a super computer via "Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)" put on by the US "National Science Foundation (NSF)"
- 2012 - Graduated from the University of Denver with my degree in Computer Science - I loved taking so many computer classes I wound up with double the credits required for the major.
- 2012 - Over a 3 year partnership with the CTO of Dealer360 we built the company's flagship product: Analytics among other solutions.
- 2017 - Had a ton of fun with High Seas Consulting building software and forming technical strategy across a series of projects.
- Case studies & cool projects I worked on:
- Paragon | DASH Operational Tool | DASH Marketing Tool | Terrane
- 2019 - Joined Starbucks a Senior Full Stack Web Engineer and started construction on a greenfield opportunity building an internally-facing web portal to streamline access to enterprise data following open-source philosophies.
- 2021 - Developed the back-end API and supporting Azure infrastructure to support a successful launch of the Vaccine Locator for the Washington State Department of Health.
- This application helped over 3.2 million people in Washington find a vaccine in the height of COVID
- Our infrastructure scaled to the demand of 200k searches/hour after Governor Inslee announced the launch of the tool on the news
🛠️ Tech Stack
These are the technologies I know really well and/or have used professionally:
Category | Technologies |
---|---|
Frontend | |
APIs & Services | |
Languages | |
Cloud | |
CI/CD Pipelines | |
DevOps | |
Testing | |
Databases | |
Misc | |
Editors |
📓 Actively Learning
These are technologies that either I'm learning and practicing in my homelab. I have not yet used these technologies professionally, but I am actively digging in to gain holistic understanding.