Professional

I am a web developer, and I love to learn from those around me. I come from a healthcare and academic background and have a passion for knowledge, teamwork, and service.

I have a strong interest in performance, efficiency, minimalism, and clean design. I believe that a good user experience is more than what is seen on the page. I love making things work, and then making them work better.

Personal

I am a transplant to the Research Triangle area and find myself enjoying it immensely. It strikes a nice balance between having city life and having access to the outdoors, and the coffee shops, breweries, and restaurants continue to please. I'm a soccer player, book-lover, and I enjoy getting out for a hike with my four-legged creature.

History (the longish short version)

I'm a lifelong tech lover who was pulled in a different direction for the first decade of my professional life. Working in physical therapy provided me with a fulfilling way to help people, make a difference, and have amazing experiences. I was also fortunate to meet wonderful patients and co-workers along the way and can say that I am a better person for it. Ultimately, I was missing something. Challenge and change.

Outside of treating professional athletes and performing research studies, physical therapy is a relatively stable field. There are long delays between research results and their application in the field. A number that was cited in school was 17 years from research results to profession-wide acceptance and application. This is actually a good thing. You want a large body of evidence supporting a treatment method before mass implementation. The upside is that it leads to stable, safe, and effective treatment protocols. The downside is that truly novel learning experiences are limited and problem solving is more human-oriented than treatment-oriented.

The longer I worked, the more I came to realize that what I desired in a career was continuous learning, problem solving, collaboration, and creation. I wanted to learn and contribute that knowledge to something bigger. Prior to physical therapy, I was in the computer science program and found it challenging, amazing, terrifying, and ultimately I was pulled away to healthcare. It was the right choice at that point in my life, but as I matured I came to realize that the challenge and curiosity that was sparked in those classes was still there.

And so I come full circle, bringing my career back to software and web development. It is a career I that I find more interesting and fulfilling each day as I wander further down the rabbit hole. There are lifetimes of knowledge and learning here that already exist and tomorrow will bring another lifetime. All I can say is bring it on.