Birds of a Feather Developers as a name began shortly after Alyssa and I met in 2022. We both left our previous companies and were hired at a relatively new startup. We quickly became friends after discovering a shared love of games - board games, video games, card games, all of it. We started playing the mobile version of Wingspan, a board game we both loved, during our downtime even though we lived thousands of miles apart. Our inside jokes quickly became all about birds, and "Birds of a Feather Developers" became a pipe dream we shared, even if we didn't actually know it would eventually become a reality.

Around the same time in 2022, I began working on some personal projects to grow my skills before being contacted by an old business associate. She reached out once I was no longer employed by my previous company and it couldn't be seen as poaching. She had an opportunity with a division at Ford who needed a barcode scanning application custom written for their Zebra devices - exactly what I did for my previous company. I had several meetings with the team at Ford before signing onto their project, and over the following couple years, their project grew enough to need something more significant. I decided to take a swing at starting this dream company by bringing Alyssa onboard.

As I started thinking it all through, I realized that if I was stepping into my dream, I should bring people with me. So I reached out to a good friend, Ryan, who had decided to pursue a career in development shortly before the tech layoffs in 2023. With limited opportunities for a first-year developer, it just made sense to bring him onboard to dip his toes in the water with his first real development projects.

And that is the humble beginning of our happy little team.

- Matthew