An active attendee of Meetups and supporter of the tech community (mostly) in Phoenix, I've had the opportunity to organize and volunteer with conferences such as WordCamp Phoenix, AIot DevFest (formerly IoT DevFest), AgileAZ, Desert Code Camp, and CSSDay.io.I got started in programming by attending a GDG Meetup and learning about a full-stack Boot Camp whose curriculum was the LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). After completion, my first few years I was immersed in WordPress, helping deliver to clients custom solutions usually in the form of plugins. Gradually I began to learn other languages, mostly in JavaScript and C# .NET (except for side projects). As one of our sister companies started to see success, we spent more time building internal tools and APIs that supported players, sales, player support, customer engagement while automating other logistical challenges. This was done in tandem while building new features and maintaining a publicly facing website that scaled up to keep pace with revenue and traffic.From an organizational standpoint, I worked to help grow our development team from its lowest of three members to over twenty. For a handful of years, I became a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and lead our transition to becoming Agile. Being involved with interviews and hiring decisions helkped us build a unique culture that was fun and able to efficiently deliver requests, sometimes within hours. For external teams, we learned their needs, helped prioritize their asks, and collaborated with them to roll out the best solutions possible.In late 2022 I transitioned to another team. While getting ramped up on those projects, I lead contractors in supporting legacy platforms along with the winding down of server resources. These efforts allowed the organization to move headcount elsewhere, and successfully winding down the team when we sunset the platforms.On the Internal Systems team, I was able to help replace third-party tools and build custom solutions to solve our challenges. This has lead to savings multiples of my salary, per year by reducing third-party tool costs, reducing server costs, reducing shipping costs, drastically reducing shipping mistakes, reducing build mistakes, and increasing efficiencies. These various projects used AngularJS, Node.js, C# .NET, JavaScript and Acumatica. By the time the organization restructured in June of 2024 we had started an incremental rewrite from AngularJS to Next.js (built on top of React.js).