work history

The things that I’ve done

Intro

2010 – Starting Out and Freelancing

In 2010, after returning to the US from abroad, I built a web portfolio and put my resume online. I did a few small jobs, all in static html/css

2011 – Internship, my First Agency, and more Freelancing

I started working with agencies when a local agency, Wild Web Studios, agreed to take me on as an ‘intern.’ I put everything I had at the time into these and was very proud. They would take my hardcoded pages and bake them in to their custom CMS. 

I did a few on-the-side projects like these. 

After working for WWS awhile and doing a few of my own projects, I needed to find something more established. FDI Creative was where I ended up, part-time at first and then full-time. They worked mostly in Joomla at the time, so I got into building custom templates in Joomla, doing customer support, and hosting support among other things. I went from junior to lead dev in the time I was there and even got my first taste of mentoring other devs when more junior developers were brought on board. 

Wanting to progress further professionally, I moved to a print company that was looking to start their own web department. They had room for growth and were willing to give me a lot of flexibility, so I was began work for CME Printing. I spent about a year and half there working in Magento, integrations and marketing…again all very good experiences.

2014 – Purposefully Purposeful, a Larger Agency

The larger design and marketing agency Savage was an exciting step for me. I remember wanting very much to jump up and down when I got the offer but I just smiled really big. Their web work was almost exclusively in WordPress building custom themes out of their, very nice and well thought out, designs. I experienced more in terms of planning and research and marketing strategy while there, and also deep dived into WordPress custom development, resuable blocks, and building themes. A small personal accomplishment while there was that I built the ‘Perculator.’ It was a base template with a solid grid and all of the typical elements and options that we usually used. I went on to use and refine it for multiple builds while serving as lead dev there and it improved our response time and the quality of our end product.

   2016 – Tech Company and the Best Manager Ever

After Savage I applied for a job at BMC Technologies, the largest company I’d worked for. After a thorough interview process I was brought on as temp to hire. I was proud that the team decided to onboard me about a month early.

The manager had a challenging situation with team members spread out globally (unusual before the covid era) but handled it well with frequent checkins, delegating and good planning. I enjoyed the team probably the most out of any job I’d had until then, despite only meeting some of them once.

The first project he gave me was to re-evaluate their tag management system and revamp it. It was intimidating as I had never worked in the Adobe Marketing Suite before. Luckily, Adobe has plenty of material online so I quickly learned how those particular systems worked, how their existing system was built, redesigned and restructured logical divisions, found and fixed bugs and delays, improved load time, and worked with the analytics and AB testing teams to correct problems and improve things. I also worked with various other internal BMC teams to handle marketing related needs such as a marketing tag generator, how-to guides, integrations with third parties that required custom solutions and integrations with Adobe, strategy and implementation of tags and analytics tracking during a complete website rebuild, WordPress development for standalone websites for events and similar, and front end modules in the Adobe system for the new build. So lots of variety and heavy on the Adobe and integrations side of things.

One thing that I was particularly proud of was that I was able to implement and maintain zero cookie load throughout BMC public facing websites in my time there.

2018 – Freelance and Consulting

In 2018 I went part-time because of some family obligations and had to step back from BMC. I maintained a good relationship with them and have done two stand-alone jobs with them since then that lasted a few a few months each. I’ve also done many projects over this period with other past employers like CME Printing, and other local businesses.

Freelancing has given me a lot of freedom to try new things and I’ve been able to add React.js to my repertoire and deep dive into online training courses related to my chosen profession. 

2024 – Looking Forward, Ready for More

In early 2024, with my family situation in a good position (read, kids entering school) I find myself wanting to connect with a regular team again and move back to full-time. I’m doing some college courses that will likely influence my future adventures.