When I went on my last job hunt I was a bit surprised at the rich startup landscape that Utah had grown into. I had offers from a few different companies at various stages of startup and deciding on one was one of the more difficult career decisions I've had to make.Ultimately I chose Neighbor because the opportunity, both financially and organizationally, was too great to pass up. Opportunity can be defined by a) the quality of the team you get to work with, b) the market opportunity of what they are building, and c) the opportunity to help build a unique organization that is carefully crafted to avoid the pitfalls of a typical successful company.With Neighbor, I saw all three opportunities were top notch.My current role at Neighbor is the Engineering Manager of one of the engineering teams. It's been the most fulfilling time in my 30+ year career so far. I'm excited about what's coming next and getting to these success stages with the amazing team Neighbor has become.

I became curious about this company’s model of not charging for the education they provide until the student gets a job as a software engineer. I decided that teaching at the school would be a great way of learning more about that model and how it impacted the quality and direction of the education.I took a part-time role where I taught part-time students in the full stack web track for. I mostly focused on teaching Advanced React.

I started out on the CanvasLMS Core team getting the final stages of a refactored TinyMCE service rolled out to customers. I quickly became the primary on that service and was able to get it deployed to our 30 million users without incident.After a year I was presented with the opportunity to lead a team that was responsible for Commons (user created repository of course content) and DocViewer (document conversion and annotation tool for all of CanvasLMS).Right before we transitioned Commons over to a new team, we completed a project in a 4 month period that fulfilled a $1.3M contract, then we transitioned the project successfully. When I left the company, the DocViewer project was processing ~3M documents a day with five nines of stability.While leading this team, we were asked to be part of the most important initiative in the company to build a data and analytics tool that gave unique insights into student success and broader CanvasLMS usage. The initiative was called Dig and my team was mostly responsible for building the API server and front-end work (using React and GraphQL). Our team was constantly ahead of schedule enough that we ended up helping other teams with their responsibilities.I left Instructure in the middle of delivering Dig when the company was purchased by a private equity company who forced layoffs and canceled all projects that were not part of the core CanvasLMS product.

I joined Zappos in 2010 largely drawn to the culture of happiness and autonomy that was expressed in Tony Hsieh's book, Delivering Happiness.I transitioned to Software Engineering Manager in November of 2011, then to a self-organized individual contributor when our company got rid of managers in transition to a self-organized model. (https://www.zapposinsights.com/about/holacracy) I'm a huge fan of the concept and became a thought leader and integrator in the transition.I had several different roles including Software Architect and Engineer, Tech Lead, Holacracy Facilitator, Tech Recruiting Mentor, Engineering Blogger, Coding Club Organizer and Presenter, among other transient roles. I basically tried to provide the most value I could at any time.A majority of my coding with Zappos was with Java back-end systems, but I had been known to branch out to other technologies and languages as the need arose.My last complete project involved creating a regionally balanced, client-based price and inventory verification system for product pages to make sure correct price and inventory was displayed to the customer. This project involved AWS (SNS, Lambda, ELB, EC2, and SQS) with a lot of NodeJS, client-side Javascript, and a smattering of Elixir back-end processes.

Getting hired with Omniture, INC. I became part of Adobe in 2009 when Adobe bought Omniture.I worked on the Java-based front end application called Discover. We used Linux, MySQL, PHP, C++, Java and Flex for all the pieces that are needed to make this system run.An effective achievement here was refactoring a code base that took 6+ hours to process customer data bringing the time down to ~ 6 minutes. This allowed us to grow on existing hardware for years to come.

With an entrepreneurial flare, I decided to join a start-up that specialized in custom development with an eye toward finding projects that could be turned into products and marketed to others. While it turns out that 2000 was a bad year to start a software company, we were able to make it work exclusively for five years until I decided I needed to get more stable work while I tried to make something happen on the side.The projects were varied using a wide range of languages (Java, Delphi, C++, C#, Bash, PHP) and operating systems (Linux, Windows, and Netware).The doors completely closed on this venture in September of 2009.

Starting out as a customer support technician with WordPerfect Corporation, I quickly rose to the rank of system consultant (Wordperfect SWAT team) traveling the world helping people setup groupware applications.I joined the venerable Novell Consulting team specializing in Groupwise and email systems when Novell bought WordPerfect. Recognizing my self-taught software developer talents, I was able to join the Software Developer Consulting arm of Novell Consulting.I did a wide variety of software development projects for a wide variety of clients, including the FBI, US Navy, Bank of America, Ministry of Transportation (Ontario, Canada), Privy Council Office (Montreal, Canada), Westpac Banking Corporation (Australia), Wallem Ship Management (Hong Kong), BEA Systems, among others.Most of my software projects during this time were around groupware and email, including standards based (SMTP and X.400) and proprietary systems (VM, Banyan mail, Groupwise, and Lotus Notes).An example of the types of projects I worked on is when I was contracted by the FBI to help them fulfill the requirements of a Congressional subpoena when they were under investigation for the Ruby Ridge incident. Their email systems at the time were proprietary and encrypted and they had no way of doing a system search for specific keywords. I created a process and software to dump all the emails in the system out to an indexed and searchable text format so they could comply with the subpoena.