My Journey

Schooling

December 2007 - I began my first year of undergrad at The Art Institute of Washington. My first 2 years were focused on graphic design while the last two years were spent in the interactive media major. Continuing my journey, I enriched my UI/UX design skills as I was still learning the basic coding languages for HMTL, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Toward the end of my education, I presented in portfolio classes where I averaged a 4.0 GPA leading to graduation in September 2012.

Early career

In October of 2012, one month after graduation I accepted the Junior Developer role at The Kennedy Center of Performing Arts. In this role, I would perform a combination of outdated cold-fusion code and table layouts which was The Kennedy Centers build. I utilized a the ITSM ticket tracking system for content updates and manual push and pull methods between servers.

One pivotal moment for me at the Kennedy Center was a project where we were tasked to convert the website to use Boootstrap, Jquery and Jquery mobile. The brunt of the lower code environments, HTML and CSS were assigned to me, while most of the Javascript, Django and Terraform work was given to more seasoned developers. I saw this as an opportunity to redesign most of the pages using layouts I felt best fit the sites content and they loved it!

In 2015, I worked briefly for a small ticketing company, Superstar Tickets as the Lead Frontend Developer. In this role, I utilized Material Lite Design and Django. Since the role was short-term and not aligned with the overall direction of my career, I've opted to leave it off my résumé. At that stage in my career, I was still clarifying my professional goals, and I realized the company's non-technical environment wasn't the best fit. My designs and codes were implemented and kept for years after, until the company closed.

Launching pad

LCG Inc was my next stop as a Lead Developer and where my career took shape, I began to understand design patterns, object-oriented languages and the foundation of what it takes to be a great team member.

I participated in every dev project from Drupal to more MVC environments using .NET. At LCG Inc, I fostered healthy career connections with management and gained confidence.

I participated in every dev project from Drupal to more MVC environments using.NET. At LCG Inc, I fostered healthy career connections with management and gained confidence.

Big Tech

Moving on from LCG, I accepted a role at Accenture. I began exploring modern frameworks and tech consulting best practices. From CI pipelines, Applied Intelligence to React js and Node js.

One of my biggest accomplishments at Accenture was starting an elite "Rapid prototyping" team with the Accenture Digital Studio in downtown Washington D.C office. My role included creating prototypes using modern and upcoming tech stacks. At the time, React was the talk of the town so that's where I focused my attention.

My last contract with Accenture was with The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB). tsp.gov needed to upgrade the user experience and outdated code practices, and I did exactly that for the client. I reconstructed the layouts, code, and fostered a new found trust between management and the federal employees.

You can find these projects on my LinkedIn

Full Stack Developer

In 2023, I returned to LCG Inc as a Full Stack Developer bringing my knowledge as a Designer, Developer and Engineer.

My first assignment back was to upgrade the Drupal website, they were still utilizing the deprecated module of Drupal 7 that I'd created in 2017 grant-review-info.com .

In 2017, there was no heavy use of Cloud services on government own projects. On this project, I moved the site to AWS by exporting the previous database to use AWS RDS, and connected the front end using a EC2 instance. Security was managed with Security groups, WAF shield and Cloud Watch.