You Wanted To Know More About Me ?

2005

I graduated from Cardington-Lincoln High School. During my high school years, I played and lettered all 4 years in basketball, baseball, and football which taught me many lessons, the most valuable being how to be a good teammate. I earned many recognitions, such as All-Conference 1st Team, 2nd Team, and Honorable Mention. Academically, I was nominated and recognized for my achievements in Who's Who Among American High School Students. Pictured here with me is one of my best friends in high school, Jen.

2007-2015

After high school, I attended 2 years at The Ohio State University majoring in Business Admin. While my grades we're good, I felt something was missing in my life. I had missed athletics dearly and never truly embraced running a business, so I joined the biggest and baddest branch, the United States Marine Corps💪.

I served 8 years as Chief Data Analyst, Database Administrator, and Network Administrator, earning a Navy Achievement Medal (NAM) for my work. I toured Bahrain, Kuwait, Japan, Australia, Guam, Thailand and many more places along the way, making lifelong friends and doing my best to make a difference in this world. It was during this time that I discovered my natural abilities to solve difficult network and database issues. Pictured here with me is my mother, Lisa, who flew out to receive me after my last deployment.

2016-2018

After the Marine Corps, I re-evaluated what was important to me. Many veterans won't admit to the difficulties of transitioning back to civilian life but I will. It was hard!

While mapping out the remainder of my life, I took a manager position at the Skyline Hotel located in western North Carolina, which included many responsibilites such as handling reservations, routine maintenance, network design and upgrades, and much more. The job paid well but was always going to be a bridge to what was next. While working here, I met the love of my life, Kayla, whom I am still with today. Kayla works as a Real-Estate agent here in North Carolina and we are building our life together in beautiful Wilmington.

2019-2022

While still working the manager position, I decided I needed to complete my college education. After all, I want to be a positive role model for my future children. I transferred and enrolled at Penn State University, majoring in Information Sciences and Technology with a focus on DevOps.

I maintained a 3.6 GPA, landing on the Dean's List 6 times and graduating in Spring of 2022. During my time at PSU, I took several programming-oriented courses, which had me hooked. In early 2021, I began to explore the JavaScript ecosystem and before I knew it, I could spend 12-14 hours a day creating and designing different web applications. This was truly the first time I felt there was something I could spend the rest of my life doing, exploring and learning more about.

Currently

I am currently sharpening my dev skills, having built 19 projects in total, all kept and maintained on GitHub. Today, I remain fascinated learning as many different JavaScript libraries and frameworks as I can. As I have learned, each package has their own syntax and use-case and so utilizing them for their intended purpose has been the best teacher in improving those skills.

I have an eye towards more strongly-typed languages such as TypeScript, Java, and C++. There are many benefits to learning these languages, such as detecting type errors at compile time but also so that I can keep growing as a developer. I want to keep my foot planted in web development but I also aspire to develop software applications, games, blockchains, or even robotics. That is truly the most inspiring attribute of programming is that you can always be learning and that fulfills my competitive spirit to always WIN!