Now

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

I now work at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital - one of the highest rated not for profit institutions in the United States. If you are able, please consider making a dontain here. Out of every dollar donated, over 80% goes directly to research and treatment. St. Jude will not give up until no child dies in the dawn of life.

The team I work on created and supports the Our St. Jude mobile application build for patient families so that they have access to everything they need to support their child or children throughout the duration of their stay at St. Jude. While this application is our main focus, our secondary area of focus is innovation in the patient experience area. I can’t comment too much on open projects, but the focus is to make patients’ and patient families’ time more comfortable and accessible while under the care of St. Jude.

My Position

My direct responsibilities can be split into 3 parts - DevOps, Engineering, and Mentoring.

On the DevOps side, I support all automation and deployments of mobile applications and cloud (Azure) infrastructure and applications. This includes branching and merge strategies for multiple repositories, a common artifact library, over 10 Terraform deployments, and multiple Docker applications. Linting, testing, and security scanning are built into the automation pipelines whenever possible. Mobile application release cycles are a little slower, but the cloud applications are deployed whenever code changes through zero downtime deployments.

As a senior engineer, I take part in planning, architecting, and development of our applications. At present, the institution is upgrading and switching many of our IT tools. These tools are integral pieces of the Our St. Jude application and where a lot of our data comes from. During this transition, I am working with other team members to determine what pieces of our system will need to be changed and what improvements can be made as we update. We will continue this planning and architecting phase through the end of 2021 and are planning for over 6 months of development work to upgrade our system. During this time, we will be updating our code from .net core 3.1 to .net 6, moving from the V3 Azure Functions runtime to V4, and making other data and design changes such as using durable functions, event sourcing, and CQRS where applicable. Additionally, all services will move to Docker based builds and deployments.

Along the same lines of being a senior engineer, I take time to learn from and teach others when I can. Cloud technology is constantly changing so staying on top of it is hard enough. While I strive to learn new relevant tech as soon as it is released, I am aware that I cannot always do that. So when presented with something new from a team member, I take time to learn from them and give them the opportunity to teach me. I also enjoy leading others to solutions whether it be through coaching them towards their own ideas or being direct when time is tight. Overall, I try to always be available and patient when I or someone else needs assistance.

Outside of Work

I have 2 beautiful daughters that are full of energy and keep me busy at every turn. But when I do have a few minutes, I run, read, golf, and do woodworking. Woodworking is quickly becoming my favorite hobby as I get to hold onto whatever I build. It’s quite different than my day to day job. I’ve built a few baby gates to prevent my kids and others from falling down stairs. Now I’m currently working on a couple of twin size headboards as my girls transition to big beds.

If it’s pretty out, I’m always open to play a round of golf. Being outside is great, if only my golf game was. Funny story about golf is that my senior project at Mississippi State was to actually create a golf training app for the pro at the golf course. Since I was the only one to play golf in our group, I immediately made a deal to be able to play golf for free all year to test our app. One of the best deals I’ve ever made. If only golf was still that cheap.