In the fall of 2021, I began working with Pitcherlist, an online baseball publication with a focus on fantasy sports, as a software developer on their front end team. I had been a long-time reader of the site, so it was great to have the opportunity to join my passion for baseball with my development expertise.

My largest contribution to the site came in the development of the leaderboard page. During my time there, I overhauled the page’s design, reworked its use of the tabling library it uses in order to increase performance, and worked with the back-end team to redesign our API several times as we gained access to more data to integrate into the site.

Beyond this, I also fully implemented premium, add-on functionality to the leaderboard in the form of our ‘Draft Calculator’, which paid members could use to track stats and exclusive projections for their fantasy drafts. I also contributed to several other features that shipped over the course of my time there.

After graduating in 2020, I began working as an Application Developer at the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, and was promoted to a Senior Application Developer shortly thereafter (November of that year). I was thrilled at this opportunity, as it meant that I'd be able to work on EHR software and continue my focus on healthcare software. Though the majority of my work involved development within the EHR, two highlights of my time there were large projects involving .NET and agile.

Prior to my arrival, the EHR we managed had very little flexibility and much of the data was isolated from other parts of the application and little automation was present. Identifying this as an issue, I first set about creating a boilerplate in C# to help the team leverage automation in order to improve functionality. From here, I created a companion library to accompnay these scripts that not only gave us greater utility from the developer perspective, streamlining the development process, but gave us the ability to query across the system for information.

Beyond this, I also left my mark by being a big proponent for an agile workflow. Though the team had begun to adopt the process when I arrived, I helped to instill further knowledge about agile, as well as help establish and maintain high standards for both our iterations as well as the agile process writ large. During my time there, we shed nearly all the inefficiencies of waterfall methodology and, utilizing agile, became both highly reactive and increased team development throughput.

During my time at university until shortly after I graduated, I worked as a Computer Support Specialist at Bryan Health, a hospital network located out of Lincoln. This position helped solidify certain areas of my expertise, show me new dimensions of the enterprise software process, as well as ignite my passion for building software for healthcare institutions.

The main facets of this position were geared towards managing physical and digital backups through SQL Server, as well as fielding calls from users with technical issues. This led a greater understanding of PC hardware, refined my abilities to diagnose problems and gather requirements, and greatly familiarized me with documentation. Importantly, I contributed to the inception and expansion of much of our teams internal documentation used for processes and procedures for many aspects of the job.

One of the greatest things I attained from my time working for Bryan was my passion for healthcare software. Though I've enjoyed every place that I've worked, working directly with nurses, doctors, and pharmacists at the hospital gave me a direct insight into how software assists not only healthcare workers, but can further work to improve patient outcomes. Working in the healthcare industry was a welcomed new dimension to my career, and I hope moving foward that I'm able to continue to work in positions where I can create and improve upon healthcare software.

From 2017 through 2020, I attended the University of Nebraska - Lincoln where I double majored in both Computer Science and History, while getting minors in both Digital Humanities and Mathematics. While I learned a great deal in many areas during my time at UNL, it importantly introduced me to several advanced software development concepts as well as devops practices.

While taking upper level courses my second two years in university, I took classes specializing in several advanced programming concepts: everything from AI, to working with big data, to algorithms and computational structures. Each of these classes benefited me in giving me exposure to not only industry standard practices, but cutting edge practices, as well as improving the efficiency I was able to bring to the applications I was programming.

Beyond this, I was able to learn and have my first experience using modern devops practices. Each team project that I worked on we were encouraged to use agile/scrum methodologies to coordinate work for the projects. This gave me invaluable experience with the structure, so that once I entered the software development industry as a career, I was already intimately familiar with the standard workflows.

Throughout my freshman year at UNL, I worked at a local company called Suleiman Holdings. Here the team of interns was primarily tasked with building out in-house tools to assist the company, the main one I assisted with being a company dashboard.

Working as an intern with Suleiman Holdings exposed me to more new concepts as a developer, such as frameworks and libraries. We utilized Meteor in order to build the dashboard, which further familiarized me with full stack development. Alongside this I was also introduced to libraries, utilizing things like weather icon libraries to build out dynamic widgets for the dashboard.

This experience not only differed from my previous position in that it offered significantly more autonomy for the internship team (instead of primarily assisting professional developers), but also introduced me to technical decision-making and project management aspects of software development. This role enhanced my skillset with new auxiliary tools while teaching me to take ownership of development choices.

My first internship took place during my junior year of high school with a local company called StateStudios. Most of my time there was spent working on their flagship product Marketboard, which was a stock market simulation application geared towards college students.

Having just recently taken an interest in programming, the internship did a lot to introduce me to some core tenets of the practice; things like front end/back end technologies, user authentication, and basic testing practices. Additionally my experience at StateStudios taught me a lot about the different lenses that one must look through when they approach technical problems, introducing me to concepts like iteratively solving problems as well as separating funcitonality into components.

Though as an intern my reach was limited, StateStudios was a fantastic experience that both gave me early exposure to software development professionals, a great environment where I was encouraged to ask questions and learn a great deal about programming, and helped solidify for myself that I wanted to make software development into my career.