You can see what I’m up to on my now page.

I started college in 2009 at Mississippi State University. However, software engineering wasn’t my first path of study. In fact, it wasn’t even my second. But after 3 major changes, I finally settled on software engineering and really enjoyed all of my classes. I knew that I had made the right choice once I started really enjoying the work being done outside of class. I even took up some projects for fun. One of the biggest projects outside of school work I did was develop a tool called LambdaText with a fraternity brother. Our fraternity - Lambda Chi Alpha - needed an easy and cheap way to message all members various updates about dues, meetings, and other updates. This could be done through email or text messaging with the use of the 10 digit phone number formatted as an email address like xxxxxxxxxx@txt.att.net. My main contribution was the ability to create groups and add members into various groups so that different committees and teams could use the messaging without spamming other members.

After college, I accepted a job at thyssenkrupp elevators working on embedded control software and eventually developing the initial version of a device known as MAX. I worked on the device that connected to the elevator control hardware and sent telemetry data to Azure’s IoT Hub for ingestion into a large data pipeline and customer portal. During development, IoT Hub was in private preview so I worked closely with Microsoft engineers as they rapidly changed the interface of how Iot Hub worked. At one point, I was in Seattle and sat with 2 engineers to debug an issue I discovered with how the C SDK was reestablishing cURL connections. It was a very fast paced and fun project to work on. I coordinated with other engineers in Atlanta and Stuttgart, Germany to globalize the solution and work on thyssenkrupp’s full elevator line.

After leaving thyssenkrupp, I started a job at Buckman to gain more experience on the cloud side of IoT deployments. Buckman is a chamical manufacturer that has customers in the paper, water, and leather industries. In addition to providing the needed chemicals to these customers, Buckman also collects data from different customer processes to be a trusted partner by monitoring, optimizing, and alerting on different data points. While there, I helped develop and maintain a data collection platform and customer portal that ingested thousands of data points per hour. This is where my love for cloud development really took off. Instead of supporting legacy, air-gapped systems that were only updated once a year, a code change I made could be deployed to all of our customers in mere minutes. I was hooked. I started learning and implementing more here such as feature switching, DevOps, and metrics gathering. I created automated pipelines to reduce deployment times from days down to minutes. I developed serverless applications for asynchronous tasks such as notifications. I also started learning Terraform and researching other infrastructure as code solutions.

It was also at Buckman that I started to gain interest in engineering leadership. It wasn’t enough to learn new technologies, I also wanted to show others what I had learned and help them grow as well. I was provided with opportunities to interview and make hiring decisions. Additionally, I was given the chance to define a 9 rung career ladder for technical associates that went from associate engineer up to a senior fellow position. It was a challenge to integrate concrete skills needed to progress the career ladder while also leaving enough room to challenge associates to reach their full potential at each step. While I was faced with some tough challenges and a change in leadership, I am still determined that engineering leadership is the next step I want to take in my career.

I left Buckman in 2019 to take a job with a wonderful charity located here in Memphis, TN - St. Jude Children’s Research hospital. Check out my now page to see why I chose to accept a job here and what I work on.

In December of 2020, I completed my Masters degree in computer science from Georgia Tech. It had always been a dream of mine to graduate from Tech and I’m glad that an online option became available. My concentration was machine learning and I highly recommend the OMSCS to anyone that is interested. It was not easy by any means, but it is highly rewarding. Look for a blog post in the future about my experiences, both the highs and lows, of this program.

If you’re interested in reaching out to me, my resume is available upon request. You can find my email address in the footer of this and every page.