What I'm About
I'm in my 15th year working for a K-12 school district in the suburbs of Kansas City. I started my career as a Computer Science teacher before moving into my current web development gig in the technology department. My teaching background is useful experience for working on solutions that not only support teachers but the whole range of district staff and services.
Current mood: The modern internet feels sluggish and heavy so, I’m on a pure HTML/CSS kick. I’ll build a narrow-scoped native WebComponent when the need outweighs the extra work. I’ve done the JavaScript framework thing (mainly AngularJS, but some VueJS) but it's too much extra work as a single developer.
Speediest at solving problems with PHP, GoLang, or JavaScript. But given language documentation, I can probably use any language pretty quickly. Web, systems, embedded… I’ve dabbled in it all.
Laravel has been my go-to backend framework for a while. I find it handy.
Professional Experience
I have over a decade of experience in problem-solving with technology. Some highlights:
Planned and built numerous web applications to support district needs. Sometimes they were other people’s ideas. Sometimes I saw a problem and took the initiative to solve it. Many times this required interfacing with vendor products.
I'm a programmer at heart, but I've had experience with other steps of the software development lifecycle:
- Led meetings with stakeholders to understand requirements.
- Created project proposals and scope documentation.
- Used user feedback to guide changes to project scope and rollout feature requests.
- Scheduled and implemented ongoing maintenance.
Created and maintained full stack systems.
Given a blank VM (Windows or Linux), I can install the environments I need to run my applications. Particularly:
- Nginx
- PHP
- MariaDB
- CouchDB
- Docker
- Redis
Developed lots of technical documentation for users in a variety of forms.
- In PDF form
- In wiki form
- In screen-captured-video form, with voice-overs and follow-along-timestamped-transcript 💅!
- In animated gif form
- In in-app tool-tips/glossary link form
Given my teaching background, I’ve been known to hold classes too!
Researched and implemented off-the-shelf, usually open source, solutions when applicable.
- LimeSurvey
- MediaWiki
- Moodle (once upon a time)
Built various bits of tooling to help me do my job.
- Deployment tools specific to my workloads/specs/infrastructure
- Ad hoc data visualizer sites
- Automatic password rotator for a vendor who was over-zealous about password changes
- Tooling for automatically building and deploying PowerSchool plugins from a command line instead of the cumbersome web UI.
Education and Work Experience
Education
-
University of Missouri - Kansas City
Kansas City, Missouri- Graduated
- May 2009
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Majors
- Computer Science and Secondary Education: Mathematics
- Honors
- Cum Laude (3.9/4.0 GPA), Trustees Scholar Award Recipient
Work History
-
Independence School District
Independence, MissouriWeb and Software Developer
- PresentComputer Science Teacher
-