This portfolio is intended to showcase my work and accomplishments. It contains professional and personal projects, along with a bit about me.
This website was built using the following languages and frameworks:
It's hosted on AWS using Route53 and ECS (Fargate, Docker). I've implemented a DevOps pipeline with GitLab CI to automatically create the infrastructure via OpenTofu (Terraform) and push out website updates on commit.
technologist, recreational cyclist, roboticist, snowboarder, amateur photographer, foodie, home-fixer-upper
One of the earliest passions in my youth was tinkering with computers. It started with creative ways to break Windows 95 on the family computer, then turned to a curiosity of viewing website source code in Internet Explorer. After spending most of my teens tinkering with technology and building several websites, I swore it off as a career to pursue other interests. Unfortunately my desire to join the military was denied due to severe astigmatism, resulting in a level of nearsightedness that did not meet the U.S. military's vision requirements. After that, it was back to the drawing board to eventually pursue psychology. When the math on that career didn't work out, I returned to the trades as a tool & die maker until the "Great Recession" forced another detour.
Sensing a local gap in talent, I then pivoted to strike out on my own for website and IT consulting services as South Shore Media. It was a great time to help small businesses get online and ride the wave of digital marketing. Within that, there were many opportunities to grow with. Google Analytics became a standard tool for traffic attribution, and Facebook was just opening up to businesses. During this era, there were a lot of old websites that needed updating from a web 1.0 static, table-based coding to ones that were rich in beautiful CSS design, interactivity, and service integrations. I was also volunteering with local non-profits and networking, to eventually work on projects for my hometown - the city itself, which was in dire need of a technology update. With that, it cemented my business as what was easily the premiere digital marketing practice in the county, if not the region.
During this time, I would partner with a local "traditional" marketing agency to provide web development services to their clients. This was a great opportunity to learn about other areas of marketing, and to work with a team of talented individuals. I was able to work on projects for a variety of clients in healthcare and other industries, even doing a project for the State of Indiana. When it was time to move on from that relationship, I decided to hang my contractor hat up and set my sights on the "city of big shoulders" - Chicago.
The transition worked out very well as I landed with another marketing agency in the healthcare field. No longer would I need to seek out clients myself, they were essentially brought to me. The quality of talent I was able to work with was on another level to those found in my hometown.
With a constant deluge of work, I quickly refined my skills, increased efficiency, and broadened my project experience. By this time, I felt I had a solid mastery of web development and server administration, so then wondered of what was to come next. Thankfully, I had been working with AWS since 2013 and realized my next interest was in cloud infrastructure. My next venture would have me back in consulting helping companies move from traditional, on-premise infrastructure to take advantage of the cloud.