I've been working as a software developer for the past 8 years. What started out as a hobby sparked by an early version of Macromedia Flash, turned into a string of freelancing gigs when a few of my early experiments caught the interest of a friend and web designer, Martin Manuel.
I spent the next three years working freelance software development jobs from the road, while touring the midwest as a musician. These jobs varied from data-driven, touch screen applications written in Flash and Actionscript 3 to corporate websites with content management systems written in PHP/MySQL.
In 2009, I grew tired of the financial ups and downs of freelancing and decided to look for a full time position. I found a home as a survey programmer and software developer with the market research company Mindwave Research. The several years I spent working on large scale market research projects and reporting tools instilled the importance of data consistency and validity.
It was during my time with Mindwave that I discovered Ruby. The more I played with Ruby at night, the more disheartened I grew working in PHP each day. In talking with my former freelancing partner, I discovered that the company he was working for needed help with a legacy Rails application that their company heavily depended on.
I started with TWGPlus in March of 2013 and have taken on numerous roles since starting, including: front-end developer - creating responsive marketing sites for our clients; application developer - maintaining and improving the CMS and reporting application that the business relies on; devops - managing the application servers and eventually creating puppet scripts which were used to relaunch their staging and development environments.