About

Howdy! Thanks for wanting to know a little more about me. I grew up in Morehead, KY, a small college town an hour away from Lexington. There wasn’t always a lot to do, for the first few years of my life we didn’t even have a full-fledged movie theatre, just one with only a single auditorium. So I had to find other ways to entertain myself. When I was 12 I made my first programming project–a text adventure built in Java inspired by my love of choose your own adventure books a-la Goosebumps. However, I quickly realized I wasn’t as much a fan of the writing part as I was the programming, so once I made my dad play the roughly five minutes of content I had actually developed I quickly scrapped the project. And thus, a passion was born.

From there I had pretty much decided I wanted to be a software developer. Every summer I tried to make a new project, never using the same language twice so that I could learn a little about a lot of areas. In my senior year of highschool I even got an internship at my local college, Morehead State University in their famous astronomy department that had even worked closely with NASA. Not to say I worked with NASA, but I worked with people who had worked with NASA…so close enough. While I was there I got to learn more about the hardware side of things, micro-controllers like Arduino and Raspberry PI. My magnum opus was a LED sign that blinked my name. It was controlled by an Arduino that I had programmed and saudered the LED lights to so I could control the colors of the letters as well as the pattern it blinked my name in. It’s a neat little thing I still have in a closet somewhere.

From there I went to the University of Kentucky and got my bachelors degree while working part-time at both an IT department and as a web developer for a community college system, still continuing my long tradition of trying to learn about completely different things–computer hardware and large-scale device management, then shortly after, Javascript and HTML.

Now I am a software engineer at Citizens primarily working in Java, but still trying to grow my ever-expanding skillset whenever I can.