Hawkflight Studios

Always meant for this

My father made sure I was exposed to computers at an early age. I had a Commodore 64 in my bedroom at the age of 5. I remember learning to type with a lobster game and was always impressed when my mother could beat it by typing at 100 wpm. I had a subscription to 3-2-1 Contact Magazine and would regularly do the Basic coding projects in it with dad. I also spent hours playing around in Logo seeing what shapes I could make the turtle draw. The highlight of my childhood programming career was when I went to a computer camp and they promised a casino night so I programmed slot machine, blackjack, and horse racing games for the event. There didn't turn out to be a casino night, but I did get an award for my efforts at the end of camp. My middle and high school years were more occupied by playing games than writing them, but I did enjoy making programs in my TI-81 calculator.

It wasn't until my first year at the University of New Mexico that I rediscovered my passion for programming. The first few weeks of the intro to programming class were going completely over my head until an assignment where we had to make a class which would act as an AI playing a game. We were allowed to make our AI as simple or complicated as we wanted and I went completely off the deep end. I ended up finishing 5th in a class of about 300 and caught the teacher's attention. The next year she hired me as a Recitation Instructor for the next two years after which I was promoted to be the Head Recitation Instructor for the following two.

My time learning in college really got me exciting where I'd pour myself into projects, both required and not. I developed Ages of War as a side project during my second semester in CS. I made by far the most intricate design of Stan Marsh for a Lisp project. My team made the most complicated and enjoyed game for our advanced programming course. I spent time on my own learning HTML and Java which were never taught in any classes I took.

When it came time to enter the workforce, I found employment with Getronics in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. they didn't seem to really know what to do with me at first. They saw my Maya Voltron project and thought I was a 3D animator. I ended up being tasked with a project to update their quarterly scorecard metric to have 3D modeled golfers and sound effects. Thankfully, I had a good mentor there in Aaron Fiskum. He helped me learn my way around SQL and Visual Studio, as well as what it's like programming in a real corporate environemnt. By the end of my time there I had been working mostly on the company's expense software and integrating SharePoint.

^{Some titles I worked with at EA Tiburon} Eventually there were some corporate shenanigans in the home office and they had to sell off our US branch to someone else. Unfortunately, our division was redundant with the new business owners and they ended up laying us all off. I moved on to a small company in Gloucester called Target Direct Marketing. They generated leads for colleges through direct mail campaigns but were looking to get into having a web presence. As their only developer, I built their platform to run these campaigns online which became the company's primary source of revenue.

I spent only a couple years at TDM before an opportunity presented itself elsewhere. A fellow RI from college that I had become good friends with, Aaron Romero, had landed a job at Electronic Arts and his team had an opening that he thought I would be a good fit for. While there, I worked with him on a central team that provided online solutions that were used across titles. I got to work directly on the next-gen consoles of the time (XBox One and PS4). While working at Electronic Arts was a childhood dream of mine, I was not a fan of C++ which was what I almost exclusively used while there.

^{The Orlando Hard Rock, largest in the world.} After almost three and a half years it was time to move on. I found my next place at Hard Rock International headquarters which was much more up my alley. There I provided my expertise in several projects from the finance reporting tool to the company-wide loyalty program. I also took the lead in upgrading and migrating our SharePoint solution. My manager at the time, Robert Jordan was a great help in bringing out my strengths and putting me in positions to succeed.

While Hard Rock was a great place for me, it turned out that the owners wanted to move the headquarters to Miami and my family was unwilling to make the move. This led me to my current position at CAPS Inc. Here I'm responsible for much of the back-end development for a web version of their compliance application. The bulk of my work has come in the form of writing many of the reports used by clients which incorporates multiple technologies. This position has been a great learning experience as it has exposed me to new tools, such as Azure functions.