$ whoami
The Christmas of 1998, when I was just 8 years old, my uncle gifted me a 100+ project kit sold by RadioShack. The kit was designed by Forrest Mims and taught me all about digital and analog circuits. I was hooked. After building my own projects and getting comfortable with the bare metal world for a few years, I discovered microcontrollers. Which led to learning my first programming language, PBASIC for Parallax's line of Basic Stamp microcontrollers.
Over the years the technology changed and as it turns out, hardware is expensive... One thing that remained free however was code. I quickly found myself enamored with anything web or internet related, the instant feedback of seeing my code do stuff was magic. I dug into anything and everything with a network connection. From weeks of reading RFCs, to going to conferences on cyber security, to hacking together a Glade air freshener to be triggered from an old IRC chat bot (because why not?); the binary world shaped my manifesto of "break it until it works".
Software isn't just a job for me, it is a lifestyle, personality, and defining trait of who I am. This passion has given me so much and I am committed to doing things the right way with a very healthy appetite for knowledge.
$ cd ./experience
Software Development
Committed to standard and core software development principles. Using proven practices such as KISS, DRY and SOLID, to deliver robust software. These principles, along with years of development experience, translate into projects that provide exactly what you need, the right way. As a full-stack developer I take passion in the back-end with any APIs, data management or custom 3rd party integrations.
On the front-end, I enjoy the craft of building things that actually look and make sense for the end user. Custom WordPress themes built from the ground up, Shopify storefronts in Liquid with all the theming and customization that comes with it, and static sites like the one you are reading now, utilizing Jekyll and GitHub Pages. Whether it’s server side rendered or a headless setup with a modern JS framework, I care about the end result being clean, fast, and maintainable.
DevOps
It is impossible to talk about proper software development and not bring up DevOps. With Development and Operations systems today, it is easier than ever to get everything in version control and automate it. Version control and local Docker development allow us to develop locally, track a running history of everything, implement code reviews and approval processes, and much more. Utilizing popular CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, we can be rest assured that any code going to any remote or live environment has been tested and approved, all without worrying about deployments.
SysAdmin
The environments where software is ran and executed is just as important as the code itself. Maintaining staging and production environments can quickly become complicated and if things go wrong, could be catastrophic. My understanding of Linux, web serving software (Apache/Nginx), routing, htaccess permissions, and general server maintenance and monitoring will provide more than just success but also stability and sound of mind.
3D Printing
What’s better than code? Code that can build real world stuff, that’s what. The whole idea of creating something in software, click a button, then poof it’s in your hands, is mind blowing. Give me a stock Ender 3 and I’ll compile new firmware, set up auto leveling, put it on a network and give it a web interface, then setup cameras for oh so beautiful time lapses. I’ve followed DIY additive manufacturing since its infancy, when building a printer from old CD-ROM drives was new and acetone baths for ABS prints were discovered.
FPV Drones
Hard to explain FPV to someone who hasn’t tried it. You strap on some goggles, arm the quad, and suddenly you’re not standing in a field anymore, you’re on a rollercoaster with you at the control. Building quads from scratch is half the fun. Picking components, soldering it all together, configuring it all in betaflight, banging your head on the desk because nothing is working now. Then you go fly it, crash it, and build it again.
Freestyle is what I gravitate to most (though cinematic is fun too!). Finding a gap and threading it, linking a combo of tricks, or just maxing the throttle and seeing what happens. The speed is addictive. The feeling of nailing something you’ve been trying for weeks is hard to beat.
The community is something else though. Meetups, festivals, impromptu fly sessions in a parking lot or bando, some of my closest friends I met through this hobby. There’s a certain kind of person drawn to FPV and I’m glad to have found them.
$ echo date('m-d-Y H:i:s');
Right now a big chunk of my time is WordPress and Shopify. Custom themes, plugin and app development, Liquid storefronts, Shopify Flows, API integrations, the full stack of it. I take the DevOps side seriously too. Everything is in version control, local dev environments, staging before anything touches production. Maintenance isn’t glamorous but done right it means clients don’t have to think about it.
Always looking for the next project that makes me say “I wonder if I can…”