My Programming Journey
I grew up in Manhattan, Kansas. In middle school, I really wanted an iPhone, but back then they were locked to AT&T which our small town didn't have. I ended up getting a Samsung Instinct (whose ads famously claimed it was an iPhone killer–it was bad). I tried learning how to program apps on it but it was beyond me. It was complicated and there weren't enough resources out there. Eventually, Palm announced the Palm Pre and I was hooked. I spent tons of time watching videos, reading articles, and discussing the phone in online forums.
I got one the day the phone released on June 6th, 2009. I remember on release day I spent much of my day on forums helping other new users answer questions and figure out how to use their new phones. I gained a little bit of notority in a VERY niche corner of the internet and was asked to be a "Technical Reviewer" of Palm Pre: The Missing Manual. (You can see my name in the "About the Creative Team" section. Clearly I didn't get the memo that the bio was supposed to be about things other than webOS).
Fast forward a few months, I decided to try my hand at programming again (age 14 or so). With webOS, I was greeted by a warm IRC community and good documentation. Through the help of many other developers, I figured it out and released a few apps. My first was a puzzle game called Countdown Puzzles. I wrote the majority of the code during a family road trip. I still remember the feeling of building something "real" (not a tutorial) for the first time and thinking, "I can do this."
Another app I made was a music player called Koto Player. A news site even wrote up an App Preview for it. I was really proud of that one.
Along the way, I also spent a lot of time on the open source twitter client, Spaz. In addition, I worked on a messaging app for a while, called Mojo Messenger but it never was released. As part of my work, I actually talked on the phone with Jan Koum of Whatsapp about an "acquisition" where I'd build a Whatsapp client for webOS. It didn't go very far when he found out I was 16ish. One day I'll write more about the experience.
In 2010, HP bought Palm and one of their new products was the HP Touchpad, a tablet to compete with the iPad. I built a Google Reader client for it called NomNomNom. Eventually, HP gave up on Palm and webOS and cut the Touchpad price way down to get rid of inventory. Over night, there were thousands of more devices out there but still the same amount of applications for sale. I still remember the feeling of opening of the app catalog developer portal and seeing how many sales I'd had. It was a wild time.
In 2012, I started in the Computer Science program at BYU. I honestly didn't enjoy it very much, but I knew that software development was what I wanted to do for my career. I worked for a random, poorly run startup for a few months until the two cofounders had a falling out and abandoned the project. From there, I worked on a special project for the BYU IT department measuring server performance. It was an interesting experience, the software I worked with supported a weird Java + JavaScript hybrid language.
From 2013 to 2015, I went down to Brazil as a Missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (I didn't do any programming).
Upon my return in 2015, I got an internship at Operational Results (ORI) as a frontend developer. That went well and I continued working with them while I finished my degree––working full-time in the summer and part-time during school. Early on, the lead frontend developer quit and I grew into that role. I learned and grew a ton in my first three years at ORI.
I graduated in 2018 with my Computer Science Degree and moved to Xactware as a Senior Frontend Developer. I enjoyed it but began to miss the small company feeling of being involved. After a year, one of my coworkers from ORI reached out with an opportunity to come back and lead the product team. After some consideration I accepted and that's where I'm at today!