Early Life

I started programming with Visual Basic in the 90s on a laptop in my father's car. Parents had just divorced and the drive to his new place every other weekend was two hours, so I had a lot of downtime going through the Visual Basic 5 and 6 books we had. After that, I started trying to program chat bots for Starcraft Battle.net, and irc bots. In highschool I started taking more Visual Basic courses, mostly because that's all that my teachers had for classes. Senior year I took some Early Education courses at the local college, and then went to that college (Keene State) for my Computer Science Degree. At Keene State, I took a lot of Java classes, that was the core curriculum. I also took some more Visual Basic courses, some C++ and web design courses as well.

After college, I thought I'd be working Java again, but I got a referral from one of my favorite professors to this company called Appropriate Solutions Inc, and started working in Python/Django. I had never touched Python outside of OpenRPG - and even then it was just installing the interpretor so I could run the game.

Appropriate Solutions Inc

At Appropriate Solutions I worked on maybe ten different projects. The first thing I worked on was an Hour Tracker to learn how Django works, it worked great, but definitley didn't look too flashy. From there, I went on to work on a Real Estate Website, a Bus tracking/mapping system for a school district, a Pinterest Clone, and some more GIS mapping things. One of our projects was with HubSpot, and I went to one of their hackathons, and a couple conferences in Boston. I had a lot of friends in Boston, so I decided to move there mid 2012.

Propel Marketing

I got my first Boston job in Quincy, MA - working at a startup called Propel Marketing. This was also a Python/Django role, but had more front end work. While there I worked on their internal CMS tooling for selling white labeld websites to clients. I worked on a lot of internal tooling, one that would pull leads from our system, and then upload to a lot of different vendor tooling …