About

Early Programming Beginnings

I started to make applications when I was 12 years old and my passion continued as I gathered more knowledge about software development. The creation of my first program excited me to make more programs and I continued it as my goal to become a software developer. Also, the ability to be creative and not binding is why programming has been enjoyable for me.

Learning Expansion

My beginning of computer science was games, which led me into: C++, DirectX, and OpenGL. Diving into game development, it has made me learn how to create games in 2D and 3D. The experience taught me fundamentals about programming is persistence and completing a project. In addition, the easy to use engines such as Unreal engine and Unity weren’t applicable to my learning curve. I focused on doing the harder approach but it has enhanced my knowledge of programming in C++ and DirectX/OpenGL.

Web Development

Throughout my coding experience, I realized the power of the web and the number of applications that were being made on top of it. Through learning more about web development, I realized that I could turn web applications into a product. I started to learn backend development like PHP, fundamentals of SEO, and internet marketing.

Web Technology

When I entered college, my websites were getting traffic and advertising had been booming. I was extensively focused on creating many content based websites and services. The technologies that I was using were CMS technologies such as Wordpress and other frameworks like Swift PHP. As I’ve been adding more skills, I had the money to employ myself and web development started to become the new norm.

Technical Projects

After I graduated from GVSU with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, I continued my web development business and websites. I wanted to pursue more in computer science so I joined a start-up company called Adaptive Projections. At Adaptive Projections, I was able to work on interactive projects such as a custom curved display that used software to map multiple projectors to form a single screen. We created software using cameras and projectors to allow digital objects to follow and interact with people walking by. The technologies that were being developed were extremely valuable in learning experience, however it wasn’t profitable and I had to move on to a traditional programming job.

USF Holland

Holland is a very large trucking company in the midwest USA. The main focus was not on software, but their large size required them to have a very reliable and robust freight management system across their network. I was able to create new functions in their system and improve others. Although this time was rewarding, I felt that with my experience and motivation I wanted to get into more cutting edge software development.

Entrepreneurship

I decided to continue working on my own again. I continued my web development company, Media Vim LLC, and started some new ventures. One of these was Crawler Builder. Crawler Builder was a web scraping platform where users could sign up and pay per usage. I created a vast set of front-end tools so that even inexperienced users could create their own custom web spiders that could extract information from sets of web pages, such as pricing information on amazon, housing information from property websites, public records and much more. This was a very fun and ambitious project. I was able to use my own PHP framework I had developed years prior and focus on ease of use for the front-end website. This was probably the first web app that required a decent amount of architecture, it was a combination of front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript, backend PHP/MySQL for the web, and also Python/Scrapy for the web crawlers that were run on their own servers.

I didn’t slow down there and I also created another SaaS application called CostBrain. At the time, my brother had recently received a grant to research pain points for restaurant owners and was able to interview 50 different establishments. He had some good ideas on creating an app for managing invoices, analyzing food costs, and helping restaurant owners make more money on their menu items. He just needed an experienced web developer that could help create the whole system. I was definitely motivated and wanted to use the experience I had on his project. We spent about one year developing our platform and had over 6,000 restaurants sign up. This was especially rewarding and challenging as well, because there was a lot more interaction and managing customers that I had with previous projects. It was an eye opener for me since it is not always what the developers want, but it is the audience that you are trying to reach. After the feature requirements for this platform began to slow down, I was eager again to learn more and push my skill level.

KPMG Development

I started slowly applying for jobs that I thought would offer a more cutting edge software development process. I had become relatively greedy in my searching and turned down many offers because I truly wanted to work with a company or team that was focused on quality software and modern technologies. Eventually, I had found a position with KPMG US. This was initially a contract position but I was thrilled because the team was working with micro services around AI/Machine Learning technologies but also in an agile environment. After only 6 months contracting with them, I was offered a full-time position as a Senior Developer. From that point on, I continued to build on my front-end and back-end skills. I recently learned how to begin developing within a cloud environment and kubernetes. I continue to work at KPMG US today and I am stoked to see what the future holds for me as a software engineer. Programming is a rewarding task that can enable an individual to be creative and learn while on the job which keeps everything fresh.

Thank you for taking the time to read about me and my journey in programming.