About

What I do

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I have been shipping code for well over two decades now, and I still really love my work. I am a huge fan of the React framework and have decades worth of experience with the .NET ecosystem which is why I tend to gravitate towards front-end heavy full stack roles. I have entirely embraced TypeScript for anything I would normally have written in JavaScript - such as a React front-end, NodeJS middle tier code, or even personal experiments with React Native. Lately I have been focusing on automating my code quality through the use of good static analysis tools like ESLint and Prettier paired with an extensive test suite - usually leveraging Kent C. Dodd’s excellent Testing Library to enhance the Jest testing framework (example).

How I got here

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I was bitten by the programming bug after seeing the Disney movie Tron as a young teenager - afterwards ceaselessly bugging my parents until they gave in and purchased a top-of-the line Apple //c for me. That computer introduced me to the world of Apple Basic and 6502 Assembler and still sits in a corner of my office (pic).

After years of developing in mainframe languages and Visual Basic 6 I finally slid into web development with the first release of ASP.NET. Fast forward a bit and I land at a startup as a “C# Cloud Developer”, but since I proved to be really handy with jQuery, HTML5 and this new-fangled thing called Sass I was tasked with being the “front-end guy”. I very quickly learned that I loved the bleeding edge of 2013 front-end development - evaluating frameworks like early AngularJS, Backbone, and Knockout tooling like the Grunt and Gulp task runners and an early bundler called Almond. The rest, as they say, is history as the frameworks, tooling, and discipline of front-end development have only grown more refined since then.

Where I am

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I live in Omaha, NE with my wife, daughter and three very random rescue dogs. Even though I am not wild about winters here in the Midwest, I cannot seem to talk my wife into moving anywhere else so I am stuck here for the time being. In my spare time I like experimenting with different programming languages and frameworks. When my family manages to get me out of the house I enjoy walking our local botanical gardens, world class zoo, or one of our many - sometimes eclectic - museums.

My Apple //c

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