Why hire me?

After initially working with AspireIQ as a consultant and re-building their marketing sites, I joined as a full-time employee on the product team. There I worked on one of the most mission-critical parts of the company, the post-campaign analytics dashboard. In this project, I built a variety of sub-pages that offered different views into the performance of posts. This ranged from a variety of graphs (which offer side by side comparison to different sets of filters) to a table view, or a view of each post with metrics attached. I also helped in the creation of the companies design system and introduced Jest and react-testing-library for front-end testing which was previously not done at all.

Over the years I have completed a wide range of freelance projects. I have had the ability to work with some really awesome clients like AspireIQ, Level Up Tutorials and CBS. At times this has been my full time source of income, at other times consulting has been a side project or put on pause. I have done this on and off since first learning how to program.

Lately I have been very focused on JAMstack development for my consulting.

Below are some of the recent sites I have created using Gatsby JS.

As a Thinkful mentor, I met with students weekly and coached them through the program to ensure their success. During these one-on-one video calls, I assisted the students with a variety of things, from jumping into their code and squashing bugs, to reviewing their resume, all the way to dealing with imposter syndrome. It is my job to make sure they become the most qualified candidates they can be by the time they graduate. This role was very exciting because it forced me to stay on my A game. I have learned several topics in great depth by explaining them to dozens of people every week.

Technologies Taught:

I was hired to replace the sole front end developer on the Architecture team, one of my first I decisions was to remove a very uncommon react boilerplate in favor of NextJS, a decision I think benefited the project long after I left. Doing this while continuing the project and keeping pace with the backend team epitomized replacing the engine while flying the plane. Because of this, this role caused a lot of growth and showed me how much I can really accomplish with the right level of focus. In this role, I also helped expand the frontend team by interviewing prospects and training a new hire.

Our team was one of the first at the company to be using React JS, and we were the first to introduce GraphQL at American Express. Because of this, I had the opportunity to train other teams on its use. All of this was done in an incredibly short span of 7 months.

I started at U-Haul as a manual tester in Quality Assurance, by the time I had left I was a Software Development Engineer in Testing. When I first started there they had no test automation, and I was a few months into teaching myself how to program. So I decided to start wrapping our applications in test harnesses using Ruby, a few months later and I had a team of people I was training and partially project managing. As the team grew I was able to work on more ambitious things, and I implemented a dashboard for test running and monitoring using React. The dashboard also integrated with Slack, sending messages to the user when their test completes. After that, I decided I wanted to continue building interfaces using React, because of this I knew I would have to leave U-Haul as all our applications outside of the one I built for testing where C# and Angular apps.