Phil Bowden Email & Phone Number

I am a drummer turned software developer. I made a living playing and teaching music for many years. Then I decided it was time for a change and went back to school to learn software development. Looking back, I think what drew me to programming were the commonalities between the 2 fields. To be successful you must embrace the never ending process of learning. There's always something new to learn. My drum students used to ask me, "how long will it take to learn to play drums?" My answer was, "I don't know I'm still working on it myself!" The first step in my new career direction was signing up for Programming Fundamentals at Green River College. I must say that this 200-level programming class was more challenging to me than some of the graduate-level music theory courses I took at UW. Nested for-loops??...OMG! Funny to look back on it now, but at the time I had a hard time with some of these basic concepts. The struggle was good though because I didn't let it stop me, which built my confidence and demonstrated that I was committed to this new career pursuit. Ultimately, I scored high in the class and this marked the point where I knew that this was the direction I wanted to go. I signed up for the Bachelor's Programming and spent the next 3 years learning about full-stack software development.Fast forwarding to my last couple of years at Accenture, I landed a backend Java developer role with PNC Bank, one of Accenture's top clients on the East Coast. One of the highlights of my role at PNC was that I got to collaborate with a diverse team of up to 15 where I built a REST API from scratch in microservices architecture using the Spring Boot Framework. After months of designing, coding, and working jointly with our product owner, testers, and UI developers the API was released into production in December 2022 and is still in use today. This API resulted in a modernized backend that saves time for customers and bank agents by 15%.I've come a long way since my early struggles with the dreaded nested for-loop, however, I've learned since then that they don't produce a very good run-time. So I try to avoid them now for more practical reasons. Currently, I'm looking to leverage the skills and experience that I gained while at Accenture and use these skills in a new setting. If anyone is looking for a backend developer with 4 years of experience and who is comfortable in the Java, Spring Boot, Microservices tech stack. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me either here on LinkedIn or to my email phil.g.bowden@gmail.com.