Here‘s my story
At least a little bit of it. I‘m a very multi-faceted person.
Action shots
Stuff I love
When I‘m not building design systems or doing freelance projects, I‘m an avid pool player. Ive played on a pool league team for going on 20 years now, even when I moved from NC to VA. I have a couple of crazy wonderful kiddos, and an amazing wife doing her face painting thing over at brightnlucky.com. Hope you like her site :). I‘m trying to learn to be more handy around the house and not have to call a tradesperson for every thing that goes wrong. Good thing my house has a ton of things that need doing, so my honeydo list is never empty.
Current specialty
As of { currentDate } I am a Lead Design System Engineer. I‘ve built and re-built 3 design systems with varying levels of usage, features, components needs. But the one thing that is common to them all is they were all made of Web Components. This is the way. Design systems ought to be in Web Components.
How I got here
Straight outta‘ college
Like a lot of young adults before, during, and after college (go Spartans?), I spent some time floundering before settling on my career path. I had graduated with an English degree, but I was always technical. I built my first computer my freshman year of college, worked on campus installing high speed internet cards and access into students‘ PCs. This was the before times when high speed internet wasn‘t common and the dorms had just begun wiring for ethernet. My school gave student employees access to the registry of who had internet access and who didn‘t. Great choice, right? Anyway, I worked in the library as a tech support rep for students and professors for campus systems like email accounts—I am TelNet years old—and that‘s where I first picked up HTML and CSS.
Early career
My first real job out of college a couple of years after graduation was for a company that installed AM radios on the sides of major highways. I went into Departments of Transportation offices and installed the proprietary management software onto their systems and configured their setups. But I bailed as soon as they wanted to put me outside in the Florida heat in a bucket truck bolting metal boxes to concrete poles. Hard pass.
After that, I was headed down the technical writing path, figuring that was the best way to not have to continually explain the English degree on my resume and why I was too lazy to finish the CS degree I started. The real explanation was that when I got 2 years in, the first assignment for my cryptography class was to rewrite the MD5 algorithm in C++. I noped outta there so fast and English was the fastest way to a degree. I had a few "technical writing" jobs where I was never used as a writer. One was a software tester, the other was a meeting note taker. I spent some time doing technical support for a well-known email marketing startup, but when I wanted to move off the phone into a technical role, they told me I didn‘t know enough SQL. Fair, I guess.
Betting on the web
After going back to waiting tables and selling computers at the local Best Buy, I was venting to my mom one day about not knowing what to do with my life. She suggested that since I had built (crappy) websites for some family and friends, that I should just get paid to do that. What a novel idea. It had never even occurred to me. So I spent the next 2 years learning everything I could about web design and development. I wanted to be a designer, so I did free projects for folks on Reddit. I built a super crappy portfolio and started applying for jobs. Got a call from a contracting company looking for a designer with some code experience, and I was off!