About

Open to work: I’m looking for a company willing to take a chance on a self-starting lifelong learner. I’m still pretty “junior” when it comes to writing software, but interpersonal relationships, communication, and prioritizing are all strengths of mine.

I’ve been engineering software in my spare time since fall of 2017, and nearly full time since January 2023.

I have spent most of my time with Python and Django, though I’ve used many other tools to help me along the way, including:

Linux
HTML + CSS
JavaScript
TypeScript
AWS
Heroku
Git
HTMX

Recent Work

I have plenty of pieces to show off. My work tends to be public, and I believe that’s a testament to my focus on usefulness over flashy, interesting, and complicated.

Mastering Fitness: A digital store for my fitness products powered by Django and sprinkles of HTMS and JS (repo)
John Dusel: A personal website for a professional sports athletic trainer with a Django backend and Next.js frontend (repo)
Adapt & Perform: Strength & conditioning in the Bay Area, composed with WordPress
Sommers Physical Therapy: Physical therapy in the Bay Area, composed with WordPress

For more, see my GitHub.

Experience

My experience with software splits into two types:

Freelance work
Personal projects

Freelance Work

Most of my freelance work has been done with WordPress, tweaking a theme with CSS, writing clean markup, and being skeptical about what software we install. My clients hire me because they want a professional presence on the internet, so most of my time is spent composing sales copy and optimizing images. You might call it UX-Driven Development.

Personal Projects

Most of my personal projects are powered by some sort of Django backend. I find Django templates meet most of my needs, but I’ve been reaching for HTMX and plain ol’ JavaScript whenever a full page reload is unacceptable.

Past Experience

Most of my life has been spent debugging humans.

I’ve carved out a niche of clientele who work in tech and have chronic aches and pains. They generally come to me after they’ve exhausted all other options and don’t feel like surgery is the correct course of action. Most of them think they are doomed to have pain forever, but often we can drastically reduce it in a single session.

Humans are similar to computers in the sense of problem solving: the correct input leads to the desired output. Enable verbose logging and filter out the important bits. Documenting a plan keeps everyone on the same page. Persistent effort begets long-term progress without introducing new bugs.

Formal Education

MS in Anatomy & Cell Biology from Indiana University in 2016

BS in Kinesiology from Indiana University in 2012