I’ve been in the technology space for nearly 25 years, mostly on the infrastructure / architecture / management side of things, and recently decided to pivot my career into full stack development. I’ve been building SaaS applications in my spare time for several years and realized that I deeply loved the challenge of identifying some problem or hole in the market, and then building something out of nothing. A few months ago, I realized that I loved it so much that I’ve started a YouTube channel where I build new projects in public, so that viewers can not only watch me code, but also understand my thought process when I’m tackling a given problem.

For my personal sites, I use a combination of Laravel / PHP / Livewire / Inertia on the backend and React / Tailwind CSS for the frontend as my primary tech stack but am comfortable working in Vue as well. I’m most proud of a site I conceived of and built for groups of season ticket holders of a sports team to figure out who gets tickets to which games, based on a drafting algorithm I created, like how those same sports teams draft and develop players out of junior leagues or college. As with all my projects, this is a one-man show; I did all the frontend, backend, and infrastructure alone, meeting my goal of 85% test coverage (I have a somewhat unhealthy obsession with TDD), and using tools like Github Actions to build the CI/CD process and implement the automated testing before deployment.

In my professional life, I’ve run the gamut from being an entrepreneur, bootstrapping and building a managed services provider from nothing into a team of 5 and then selling and exiting the business several years ago, to building the entire Terraform module library, ingraining and living the CI/CD methodology, and managing a team of DevOps engineers at Symend, a fintech startup based here in Calgary, to being an enterprise architect and eventually the head of the entire technology organization at an airline.

At the end of the day, I’m looking for an opportunity to take both the hard and soft skills I’ve learned over my career and use them to build new web applications that make an impact and make the world a better place.