In April 2007 I was tired of dead-end jobs, so I bought a book on building websites with Apache, PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS, quit my full-time job, and kept only a part-time night job as a club DJ so I could spend my days learning to program.
By the end of that year, the social networking site I built while learning had landed me my first professional role, as the first in-house software engineer for a small online merchandise business in Wichita, Kansas. I fixed its website, added 30,000 products with an importer I wrote, picked up some ActionScript and Flash, and grew its traffic from a few visitors a week to over 100 a day through SEO. The business still went bankrupt five months after I joined.
For the next few years I worked full-time as a CNC machinist, and spent my own time getting better at software.
In 2008 I moved to C# and .NET, and that October started building a game with Microsoft's XNA framework, which let me write games for PC and Xbox 360 in C#. I released it, Cosmos, on Xbox 360 that December under my new company, Stoic Dreams.
Cosmos was not a financial success, but it taught me performance tuning and object-oriented design, and the quality of my other projects jumped because of it. I spent the next couple of years building games, websites, and desktop tools to speed up my own work.
At the end of 2010 I moved to Florida and joined SoftRock. I had never used ColdFusion, its main language, but within six months I was showing experienced ColdFusion developers parts of the language they hadn't used, and I went on to write many of the company's shared libraries.
When SoftRock closed, its owner started General Services Corp and brought a few of us with him. There I worked directly with the owner, turning his business problems into working software, and refined the way I still work today: small, tested changes pushed to production several times a day.
My wife and I then moved to Washington, where I joined Microsoft as a contractor and soon moved to full-time. There I learned Azure, Azure DevOps, and React with TypeScript, and worked on enterprise products at a much larger scale.
In 2022 I moved my own work to Rust, for its speed, memory safety, and fearless concurrency. Later that year I joined Opyn Health, where I now lead UI work on its healthcare web applications. In 2023 I published my book, CASE: Continuous Agile Software Engineering, and in 2026 I founded Wyrdloom Studios to build games on my own Rust engine, Fabric Engine.
For the details of each role and what I delivered, see my experience. To see what I'm building now, see my projects.
You can also come chat with us on the Stoic Dreams discord server.