about

Hey! I'm a software developer by day and a musician by night. I pride myself on excellence in the workplace, not out of arrogance, but out of humility and others-mindedness. I work hard to see my peers succeed. I live by the mantra "work hard and go home." In other words, work-life balance is a key value of mine. I value my family, my church, and my art in addition to my work.

professional summary

My career up to this point has been in the startup world, where things move fast — teams and budgets are slim, and as such, each engineer must hoist a wide net of responsibilities. I needed to think fast on my feet and solve problems with little guidance or support. Often, this meant wielding a technology or design pattern I was not familiar with. Much of my learning in my career has been done on the fly.

My first experience with true full-stack development began back in Jan. 2022. I and another young developer were tasked with building up the Phenomena Learning ed-tech web application. Phenomena was a tiny ed-tech startup, and the CEO gave me little direction in terms of engineering best practices or dev ops. All we had was a vague tech stack — Vue.js and the Google Firebase backend-as-a-service platform (for running server-side code, handling bucket storage, and performing DB operations in Firebase’s no-SQL offering, Firestore). I developed user stories to ensure we were building an application that fulfilled all the CEO’s requirements. Once this was done, I discerned tangible action items and transferred them into project management software (first Asana, then later, Jira). I divvyed up tasks between myself and the other developer. We conducted code reviews for each PR, and I implemented unit tests to ensure any refactoring would not break existing functionality. In the absence of a UX designer, I picked up many of the design responsibilities and became well acquainted with the design tool, Figma.

Throughout this time and to this day, I have also volunteered as one of the tech leads for the missions organization, Upstream. Upstream’s bread and butter is the creation of "story reader" mobile apps tailored for people groups in hard-to-reach areas across the globe, whose inhabitants may not have literacy, yet can still navigate a smartphone. Upstream typically hires an intern cohort every fall and spring to develop these apps. My role has largely been one of mentorship of these younger developers, many of which are completely new to mobile development, let alone Flutter (our native framework of choice). As a mentor, I talk the interns through approaches to particular coding problems, perform code reviews, and stay on top project management (in this case, a Kanban board in Github).

Regarding my most recent work experience at Relay Product Collective, I was promoted to a senior-level engineer once I became Engineering Lead of a web/native hybrid project called “Entrega Delivery”, which you can think of as “Instacart for construction crews” with an integrated admin web app. The mobile side of the project was built in React Native, and the web app was in React. AWS was our cloud service provider. The Entrega team was small but mighty. I handled project management duties in Notion. Later, I became the engineering lead for another Relay project, ShopYourPlan. This is an application that helps Medicare advisors collect information from seniors that aids them in the process of enrolling for Medicare. I managed up to three other engineers at once during the development of this app, and I acted as a point person between the client and the rest of the engineering team. Again I performed project management responsibilities and reviewed code. I also implemented Sentry error monitoring and addressing critical errors in the app.