My fascination with programming began with video games. My parents bought me Mario Kart: Double Dash and The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for the Nintendo GameCube. I was amazed to figure out that these games were built with code, and I wanted to know how. Around age twelve, I picked up C++ for Dummies from my local Barnes and Noble and started building CLI apps in Code::Blocks. When I hit a wall trying to build GUIs, I discovered JavaFX and continued my crash course in Java.

Over the next few years, I picked up HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and kept reading about C++ and Java. Soon, my Dad picked up on my interest in development and promoted me from associate lawn mower to assistant Web Developer in the family business. I learned about server maintenance, language versioning, image optimization, SEO, and performance tuning. That early experience gave me a foundation in real-world software challenges.

I enrolled in the University of Kansas in the Fall of 2017 with one goal: land an internship in web development. I built my resume at the engineering career center, practiced my pitch, and prepared for career fairs. After multiple interviews and coding challenges, I didn’t land an internship that fall, but I was undaunted. After the spring career fair, I had secured a role at Rx Savings Solutions.

The internship was everything I wanted and more, I learned more in three months than I had in the previous seven years combined. I built tools that made it into production and formed lasting relationships. The internship turned into a part-time role, and later transitioned to full-time. I optimized Redis caches, managed support rotations, and gained deep experience testing and product development.

With Rx Savings Solutions' support, I transferred to an online CS program at Western Governors University to better align with my work schedule. After two years, my time at RxSS came to an end, so I decided to broaden my experience across new stacks and team dynamics.

At Active Logic Labs, I sharpened my skills in full-stack development with Laravel and Vue.js. At Crescendo Collective, I learned how to build scalable backend services in production Java. Later at Homebase, I stepped into a senior role—leading architecture discussions and collaborating across teams to design solutions that respected the needs of product, design, and ops.

I’m currently a Senior Backend Software Developer at Penn Entertainment, where I own a mission-critical player experience data processing platform. I work independently to design and ship reliable backend services that support high-volume user interactions and data integrity across multiple systems.