I started my development journey in 2018, after spending 5 years at a company that distributed groceries to gas stations, convenience shops and other stores. I worked my way up through technical support, starting on 3rd shift. Eventually I became the lead support associate and began working with the independent contractor who was developing the application that my team supported with our customers and sales staff. I began looking for bugs and figuring out the scenarios in which the app failed or worked counterintuitively. I realized that I enjoyed the work, but I wanted more - so I spoke with our IT Director and he explained that he had wanted to hire someone internally for years but nobody ever wanted it enough. He explained that if I came back with proof of my abilities, he would consider a promotion to become an app developer.

So I went looking for ways to learn, and I came across an online platform called Udacity. This platform offered courses called Nanodegrees - these courses were often sponsored by major tech companies. I found an opportunity to enter a competition to earn a full scholarship to a Nanodegree sponsored by Google with the entire purpose being to train more Android developers. I entered the challenge and was selected as 1 of 5,000 to earn a scholarship out of 100,000 total applicants. I started my way through the Nanodegree, and quickly proved myself as a skilled developer, even though I had never written a single line of code before. I finished the 9 months of course work in less than 5 and quickly became a mentor to the many of the other students. I helped them understand the material better and grow in their own abilities before Udacity offered me a 2nd scholarship in their advanced Nanodegree for Android Development as long as I continued to assist the other students in finishing their projects.

6 more months and I completed the Advanced program before bringing those certificates into my IT Directors office. We talked through everything that I had learned, and within 2 weeks I was ordering my first MacBook to be the companies app developer. I spent the remaining 2.5 years working to advance the application from an outdated solution to be as cutting edge as possible, even though we didn’t always have the infrastructure for the dreams I had for the app. At the beginning of 2022, after the collective world’s restart after Covid, I realized that I didn’t want to be stuck in an office anymore, and as management retired and I lost the IT Director who hired me - things were changing, but not for the better. Micromanagement set in, and I just couldn’t do me while being restricted by a supervisor who didn’t understand (and didn’t want to understand) how apps worked. So I put my name out there on LinkedIn, thinking that it would take several months but I quickly learned that there were many companies out there who wanted to hire passionate developers like myself. So in May of 2022, I put in my notice with the company I had worked at for almost a decade to step into the unknown with a smaller startup as a Jr. Developer - and I never looked back. This journey has been so amazing and I’ve learned so many skills that I look forward to investing into Birds of a Feather Developers as well.

I have extensive experience in the .Net Suite, spending most of my career writing in Xamarin Native, Xamarin Forms & .Net Maui. But I also have a background with Java, Flutter & Swift.