Software Developer:

In February of 2019 I joined the ranks of Foolish Developers with The Motley Fool. I quickly picked up how to deploy a local environment using PyCharm's IDE and began blindly dabbling in Django templating. After 3 months I started deploying several templates to highlight various financial products based on Wagtail Administrator's picks. I have also written several filters to automate content updates to reflect product name changes and dates much like Word Press short codes. I love that I'm learning new things, proving myself in unknown technologies and expanding my horizons.

In 2014 I was hand picked to be part of CenturyLink’s pilot agile team. Over the past four years I implemented redesigns to make online ordering flows responsive utilizing bootstrap. I helped transition a series of pages from jQuery to AngularJS. I am the subject matter expert for implementing Adobe Analytics and Live Engage third party includes to CenturyLink’s residential ordering flows. I helped establish reliable JavaScript and CSS optimization across a distributed website with distinct development, test and production areas where files might be in a different state per environment despite a shared content code base via Shell scripts and cron jobs. While I strongly dislike the quirks IE, I take the time verify that my solutions look up to snuff in that browser along with Chrome and Firefox. I also dabbled in web accessibility verification and automated testing as part of this team.

I began my journey into website development with an internal transfer in late 2005. I first worked with a Stellent content based management system where I learned how build custom objects so our business partners could update promotional content on the fly without code releases or interactions with developers. I started with old school table HTML, learning on the fly. Through the years I helped setup a home grown content system using Dimensions and Apache Velocity to render dynamic content for online internet and phone ordering. I forced the business to move on from button imagery and to rely upon CSS3 as an effort to reduce page sizes and maintenance cost for branding overhauls post mergers. I also lead the effort to update our websites to HTML5 and oversaw the first mobile redesign for a set of static internet help pages. I lead several offshore based fast change teams over this 9 year period.

My journey with CenturyLink really started with USWest, I survived the Qwest Communications and CenturyLink mergers as well as many acquisitions. I was part of a REFIT program where the objective was to Retrain Engineers For Information Technologies. I went through formal coding, database, and networking classes offered at Arapaho Community College and the University of Denver while working 3 days a week with a development team. I was put into the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) team where I programmed various touch tone queues. I quickly mastered that system and became a lead developer within 6 years despite several hiring and promotional freezes. I was part of the team that transitioned the IVR’s from touch tone to speech recognition. While on the IVR team, I worked on the company’s first #Net application to support the speech recognition platform. One of my crowning achievements on the IVR team was implementing a real time outage message recording routine such that relevant messaging to customers experiencing service outages could be injected on the fly without a code release. I also gained a ton of experience mentoring offshore co-workers and lead an internal phrase transcribing application development.

Once upon a time, I did actually work in the field I spent so many years studying in college. As a ground water modeler, the coolest project I did was to build a user interface to automate reports for various client groups. The reports included statistical data scrubbing, customized linear charts, aerial plots of average concentrations of chemicals, and beautifully formatted excel tables using Visual Basic, IDL and SQL queries. This involved integrating with autocad drawings and setting up user permissions by projects. I was intimate with Microsoft Access relational databases as I had to design them to store groundwater and contamination levels as well as physical properties of soils based on geographical locations for various client groups and remediation/containment sites. I spent the majority of my time calibrating and developing groundwater models for environmental remediation sites utilizing a variety of 2D and 3D software applications including SWANFLOW, MODFLOW, and MODPATH3. So yeah, I’m a geek at heart.