Currently residing in Atlanta, GA working for UserTesting as a Staff Engineer. I am best described as a pixel pusher, css wrangler and coding monkey. I’ve been told I am a rare breed by all the people I have worked with in that I can not only design, but apply that design to the conform to the strict standards of xHTML and CSS and also make it dynamic through programming languages. Apparently, it is hard to find people that can do all that and a bag of chips. As I have grown in my career interests, I now have a few years of experience managing fellow engineers to help them grow in their career goals.
Education
I graduated from Virginia Tech in 2005 with a BFA degree concentrating in Graphic Design. Of course, that was not the program I started out in. I did a stint in the Computer Science department for a semester and a half before ultimately finding my creativity able to blossom at the art department. At the time, the art department had very limited web design classes, but what ones there were, I ate up and fell in love with. They helped satisfy my two sides, geekness and the creative monster. Needless to say, I had to self teach my self the programming languages besides basic HTML and CSS; luckily I am a sponge for that stuff.
Experience
So far, I have worked for design houses to startups over my career. Plenty of freelance work has filled the gaps when I have down time in the evenings. Music is my passion and have had the opportunity to work with the guys at Indierock Media which is now Reccenter doing design and web development work for the record industry, branching out into social media and UX for iOS applications.
I got into the startup world through RealTravel (no longer around) — an online trip research and planning website where I was the Sr. Front-end Web Developer. In the role I was in charge of everything from concept and design work to user experience to finally implementing the designs into front-end code using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Working closely with the Ruby engineers on the team, I grew my knowledge and experience of the Ruby framework, Ruby on Rails. RealTravel was then bought by UpTake (also no longer around after being purchased by Groupon) — one of RealTravel’s competitors, where I continued to work as the Front-end developer for about four months more.
After leaving the UpTake/RealTravel team I went to work for Patch — a hyper local news site owned by AOL, as a Software Engineer. Getting my taste of a larger company and on a team of five other Front-end developers I worked closely with the product team on editorial to help create features for not only their reader base, but their huge team of editors in the field.
Currently I am Sr. Software Engineer and Engineering Manager for UserTesting — a software as a service company that specializes in helping and encouraging usability testing for lots of big name enterprise and corporate companies.
Skill set
Over the years, my programming language of choice has jumped all over the map. From ASP.net to PHP and finally settling on Ruby on Rails — probably going to stick with that one for a good while. Of course there is also the HTML and CSS ability, but I also dabble in ActionScript and JavaScript as I have built my own suites using popular JavaScript libraries.
