A Little About Me
I build systems and technical decisions that thrive where engineering meets other domains: product, design, data, business, and beyond.
I'm a cross-domain engineer. I started my career running design calls and building frontends for large healthcare organizations, that led to talking with business stakeholders while architecting solutions on the spot. My work has always lived at the boundaries between teams, building the systems and making the decisions that work for all of them.
But, my background is... unconventional to say the least. Nonetheless, the path is a pretty interesting one.
Starting from Scratch
When I left for college, I had two options for my future in my head: I was either going to be a professional baseball player or I was going to go to medical school. I was arriving on campus with a spot on the baseball team and a whole semester of biology classes laid out. Unfortunately, that plan very quickly imploded: within my first semester, I was completely burned out on baseball and was having knee surgery, along with that I had successfully failed my first biology class.
I moved back home, got a job working as an optometry assistant, and was completely lost on what my plan for the future was. I was effectively starting from scratch.
December 2021
My stepdad forwarded me a Reddit post about a free software engineering bootcamp with a group called 100Devs. I had always been tech adjacent (video games, social media, typing, etc.) but never to that extent. But, at this point in my life, there wasn't much at risk from simply trying.
Hands on Keyboard → First Role
January 2022
The bootcamp started and I absolutely fell in love with development. The ability to type something into a computer and have something, a solution, come to life. I knew this was what I wanted to do with my career, so the grind started. I would keep up with the streams at night in between classes, I would bring my computer with me to work and code on my lunch breaks, I was constantly thinking about the next time I was able to get my hands on a keyboard. While I was learning, I started to try to put my name out there for some potential roles as well.
June 2022
I landed my first role in tech six months out from my first line of code. It was a design support role for a healthcare digital marketing platform. I quickly jumped into the fire, pushing boundaries, taking on more and more tasks, and getting accustomed to a full-time tech role at 19.
That first role taught me the skill I continued to build on later in my career. I would be in design calls, listening to doctors describe their brand, a word they wanted people to associate with their site, or how they wanted their clients to feel visiting the site. My background was to take that design concept, mockup, or inspiration and turn it into a live site for that client. Having no design background, I quickly had to learn to translate between these domains.
August 2022
I was officially promoted to Front End Designer, only two months into my new role. Translation was the full scope of my job now. Eventually, I began leading design and devlopment for our enterprise clients as well. Within a year, I contributed to 40% of all website launches from our team.
When our CEO came and asked how we could turn around sites faster, I made the case for a better template and starting point for every build, abstracting mundane (especially the valuable ones that would be bad if we missed) changes away from every single build. That is where I began thinking about solutions in systems that can remove these repetitive decisions from everyday work.
May 2024
I was laid off from my first company in tech... five months before my wedding day. I was thrust into a job hunt that I was completely unprepared for and proceeded to scramble: thousands of applications a day, cutting corners, staying up to absurd hours of the morning and waking up a few hours later just to do it again.
August 2024
I got offered my previous role back from my original company. I took the offer, showed up on the first day, got my laptop back and a recap of updates from my clients; I distinctly remember sitting in my car at the end of the day and telling myself: I will not let that happen to me again. Not the layoff, but being so utterly unprepared and unfocused on my career.
Investment → Second Role
From that point on, I completely shifted my approach to my career. I quickly got plugged into development communities like 100Devs and Dallas Software Developers, I started making content and writing about my thoughts, and expanded my foundation into backend development, data, DevOps, and more. From this, I started to get a lot of traction: my first speaking engagement came at a Night of UX/UI event with the Dallas Software Developers. From there, I was consistently working to pour into new developers, engage with the community, and continue to push myself to become a better developer.
Then, a new role came up within the community that resonated with me. I found myself in multiple interviews with this organization, and finally...
March 2025
I joined another healthcare organization as a full stack developer and inherited a contractor-built platform that was failing more than 1,000 times a week. I led the redesign, which cut critical failures by 99% and raised automation from 30% to over 80%. I was promoted in my first review cycle.
A big area during this time came from my meetings. For almost two years, I sat in rooms with business stakeholders who would describe what was going wrong: a process that kept breaking, a compliance concern, a process they needed to be automated. My job became to turn that conversation into a technical need and an implementation plan. When something needed executive approval: I gathered metrics, built a working version and demoed it to the executive team. When a technical need was buried under so much other work, I built a proof of concept after hours and brought it to my manager. This is where I began to fully find and expand my skillset on the systems and technical decisions between business domains.
What I Do Now
I write and speak about technical decisions that have to work across domains: how they get made, how to make a case for them, and the systems that keep them working. My content aims to pair a technical layer (architecture, frontend, backend, AI) with another discipline (product, design, data, or the business).
I have now been able to speak at multiple conferences including React Summit and Commit Your Code, became the youngest guest on the freeCodeCamp podcast, and continued to post and engage with the development community.
Day to day, I'm a Full Stack Developer II at HaloMD, leading engineering and architecture.
Outside of the Code
I am now married to my high school sweetheart, Kiera. If we aren't playing with our dog or taking care of our other animals (ask me about our frogs), I still love keeping up with an assortment of sports (baseball, football, soccer, tennis, you name it). My hobbies can range from coding (doesn't count as work if I enjoy it), to running and golfing, to collecting Pokémon cards and other trinkets. We consistently attend and serve at our local church, including speaking for a wide range of audiences.