About Me
I can’t say there was a ‘lightbulb’ moment for me when the stars aligned and I knew I was destined to be developing for a start-up. I can tell you I was raised in Michigan by two wonderful, supportive parents and a brother who always left big shoes to fill (and still does to this day). For college I attended Michigan State University and received a degree in Computer Science & Engineering with a minor in German.
My major was mostly comprised of software development classes and I spent countless hours in labs applying CS theory to unpractical, slow moving, and out-of-date 'real-world examples'. Even though I was turned off to software development, I still really enjoyed web development and I found myself seeking out freelance website projects.
Tackling these large websites by myself is where I realized the freedom and flexibility of web development - something I really enjoyed. If something isn't well received, then you scrap it and iterate. In software development, it always seemed like once a project reached a certain threshold, there was no turning back or changing. I knew web development was what I wanted to do, so on my last day of college I packed my car with everything I owned, drove to my Calculus 4 final and then proceeded to drive 38 hours to Southern California.
With internships at MSU, Toyota, Toro, and my own freelance company MSU under my belt, I started looking around for start-ups to work at in LA. I heard start-ups were meritocracies and I was looking for a place that would look past my age and reward hard-work, so in my mind it was a no-brainer. After interviewing with a couple of companies I ended up accepting a job doing front-end web development at a small start-up (5 full-time employees).
I spent the next year building website after website ( 9 in total ) using PHP/MySQL/jQuery/HTML/CSS. After honing the craft of building designed-focused websites, it was time to further my professional development. I was ready for more challenging websites with in-depth and more complex technology stacks so I accepted a consulting position at Global Notion - an incubator responsible for multiple web properties accumulating tens of millions of visitors each month.
At Global Notion, I spent most of my time doing more front-end development and analyzing A/B tests. I spent many nights pulling user engagement metrics and learning a lot about the dichotomy between the perception of how users are interacting on your website, and the reality. After consulting for only 3 months, I received an offer to move up to San Francisco and be on the ground floor of a start-up. I was very excited about the opportunity and relocated immediately.
The start-up is thredUP.com and I've spent more than two years there doing my best to help elevate thredUP's engineering output. I started as a generalist Rails engineer working up and down the stack, but I'm now the web team's lead engineer and I head up all of our projects and deployments. It's been a fantastic ride so far and there is still a lot ahead of us that I'm grinning ear to ear to work on.