About
Overview
For over 20 years I've worked as a software engineer dedicated to delivering high quality software and solving complex problems. The last 7+ years I've held multiple engineering management and leadership roles.
Build experiences, not software
My core mission is building diverse, high performance teams that deliver exceptional products — business, customer, and experience first.
Experience
Engineering Leadership: 7+ years | Software Engineer: 20+ years
My main experience is developing full stack Node, Typescript, Javascript, and my favorite, React. But, I do enjoy Go, Python, Kotlin, and occasionally some poorly written Rust. These days I work in engineering leadership owning product engineering end-to-end — from platform infrastructure and mail operations to security, compliance, and hiring.
Right now you can find me running all things engineering and then some at Postmark (under ActiveCampaign) — a large-scale transactional email platform processing 3B+ emails/month serving thousands of customers.
Companies I've worked at in the past include DocuSign, Apartments.com, Arrive Logistics, and OpenLane. Once upon a time I worked at a marketing agency completing projects for AT&T, Bosch, H&R Block, and Mazda to name a few.
Experience & Education
Industries: Email, Security/Compliance, Finance, CRM/Marketing, Legal, Logistics, Automotive, Real Estate, E-Commerce, Advertising, Developer Tools/Open Source
Project Types: Infrastructure Scaling, Legacy System Migrations, Observability & Monitoring, Security & Fraud Prevention, Compliance (SOC2), Finance, Accounting, Billing, Pricing & Packaging, Workflow Engines, Realtime & Event Systems, Data Ingestion, BI, Data Visualization, Data Analytics, AI/ML Integration, ReactJS Migrations, Open Source SDKs, Developer Productivity/Tooling, SDLC & Agile, Defect Analysis
Additional Experience: Product Management, UX/UI Design, QA/Automation
Additional Education: LinkedIn Courses - Critical Thinking, Taking Charge of Leadership Conversations, How Leaders Can Motivate Others by Creating Meaning, Communicating with EQ
More information available on LinkedIn.
Other
Coaching & Volunteering
Coaching and mentoring is a true passion of mine. Previously I've worked with engineers ranging from junior to senior, staff, and even other technical leaders. Product owners and designers are more than welcome too.
Mentoring Platforms: Plato, MentorCruise, Private
Volunteering: Founded ActiveAbility ERG at ActiveCampaign (mental health, disabilities, and well-being), Upright Education Engineering Instructor, Startup Institute Chicago Javascript Teacher, Chicago Javascript Camp Staff, Oral Cancer Foundation
I'm also a vocal advocate for mental health in tech — because building great teams starts with taking care of the people on them.
React Loop Conference
ReactLoop is Chicago's only ReactJS conference that a few friends and I organized in 2019.
Year 1: 250+ attendees (sold out!), 12 speakers, 2 keynotes, 5 sponsors, and 8 partner companies
The Longer Story
My background is cliche in some respects but my background started in hacking games, creating game art, and digital art.
In gaming I spent days on days hacking into Age of Empires decompiling DLLs, writing simple if/thens, and creating character art. One day my dad caught me using MS Paint dabbing pixel-by-pixel creating Achilles black Myrmidon armor based on the 2001 Troy movie with Brad Pitt.
He asked what I was doing and in turn introduced me to Photoshop which is my longest running skill set. What a lifesaver for my time and catalyst for what would become my future.
Getting older I started to move into digital art using Photoshop, Illustrator, and Cinema4D. My career as an artist didn't go nearly as far as my friends who became top tier artists but it was a great experience. If you've known me long enough you'll remember me from the IF Skin Zone and my forum Elite Graphics.
Those skills took me into freelance where I created websites, designed marketing/print, and went deep into Wordpress/LAMP stack. Arrogantly I even took my portfolio at 16 to apply for a design job at State Farm. They shot me down but it didn't matter.
It didn't stop me from continuing forward growing as both an engineer and designer.
What's important is the foundation was built and supported my future career every step of the way. I've been permanently influenced with an exceptionally passionate drive towards the best design and user experiences.
It took many years for my tagline "build experiences, not software" to come to life but it's been my core mission for longer than I can remember.
