About Me

I’m a reasonably funny geek who loves using creativity in… well… creative ways. This short quote sums it up quite nicely I think.

I like to build things. Then break things. Then I fix them back up. Usually…

Over the years I’ve spent my spare time playing and coaching soccer, taking photographs, and dog training along with trying out every new technology that comes my way. These days, I spend lots of weekends in the yard with a not-so-helpful crew of assistants, Netflix’ing (is that a thing?), and coding in one of several half-finished personal projects in my github repos.

Dogs, GoPro’s,
and Slow Motion

I have been known to strap a GoPro on my dogs. Usually 45lb Luka gets tasked with being a mobile camera mount.

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Photography

I have been known to take a photo or two. Sports, product, nightlife, and of course… dogs.

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What I’m Reading

Ready Player One

The book is set in the “not too distant future” where we’ve basically mauled the planet and real-life pretty much sucks. So most of humanity escapes into an online virtual reality where they can (mostly) be anything they want to be. The creator of this virtual environment (called the OASIS) left behind a puzzle and the one who solves the puzzle will win his fortune. Years have gone by and no one has yet solved the puzzle.

The story centers around a young student who finally figures out the first parts of the puzzle and kicks the race to find the fortune into overdrive. This is being made into a movie scheduled to be released in 2018. There is an incredible mix of 80’s culture (video games, movies, music), futuristic grungy filth, and high tech futuristic environments.

Official Synopsis:

In the year 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade’s devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world’s digital confines—puzzles that are based on their creator’s obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them.
But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade’s going to survive, he’ll have to win—and confront the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

Next Book -> Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel

Employment

If you’re reading this far, you may be here trying to figure out if I’m a good fit for your company and whether or not to hire me. You may have already seen my resume, but if you haven’t you can get it here.

Experience
(that won’t fit on the resume)

Over the past ~18months at Targeted Victory a majority of my time was spent doing “agency-like” work, taking PSD mockups from our super talented web designers and turning them into fast-loading, responsive websites. A minority of my time was spent working on plugins that connected to our own services (usually centered around data-collection) or those of 3rd party APIs. These websites were mostly high-profile and high-traffic. Performance and uptime were a crucial metric in conversions.

I created a starter-template in WordPress that became the standard for new builds. It was based on Underscores with an influence from the Roots Sage starter theme. It was modified with some special page templates, frequently used functions, and with a few small tweaks could be ready to roll with either Bootstrap or SemanticUI front-end frameworks. SASS/LESS is compiled, JS is concatenated, both are minified and versioned to avoid cache issues.

I worked on some automation tools because deploying and updating 150+ sites can be… challenging.

I also spent some time pitching in with DevOps. For example, I helped run load-tests to find possible points of failure in the application or hosting environment during insanely high traffic. I worked on configuring and deploying a Web Application Firewall (WAF) using AWS resources.