Team Building

I am an active athlete in both team and individual sports and carry the same spirit of competition and desire to win for my teams in the workplace.

My experience has taught me that teams who are in a constant pursuit of excellence are acutely aware of their individual strengths and ability for continuous improvement. This understanding is then applied to both the tactical application of skills, as well as the teaching and sharing of knowledge enabling the growth of the team. This approach requires a great deal of self-reflection and focus thus, enforcing a strong sense of peer accountability yielding highly motivated and self-managed teams. By establishing defined roles and implementing continuous feedback both from coaches or managers, as well as peers, individuals are more likely to become highly valued members of the team. When all members of a team are performing at their best the group synergy becomes visible and the ultimate output can exceed even the highest expectations.

Software Architect

Before I was a software developer I had the opportunity to serve as a software architect and business analyst, working with both in-house and international development teams. During these experiences I learned both the value and pitfalls of wire framing and was instrumental in implementing a process called speed sketching.

Speed sketching is a process during which all parties involved in a software project (or any business problem) get together and through a series of strictly timed intervals sketch out their solutions to the stated problem. A series of sessions of pairing and sharing follows, then ultimately a presentation of sketches to the group as a whole. This is a very simplistic explanation, but I have found it to be a valuable tool not only for getting everyone on the same page, but also stumbling upon game changing ideas!

The challenges of software architecture center around the ability to communicate clearly with a multitude of stakeholders. This requires the ability to tell the story of the proposed software in varying levels of detail using multiple mediums. The process I found to work best involved a combination of flow charts, wire frames, along with written and verbal communication.

Scrum Master

The focus of Scrum is to deliver small chunks of production-ready software and incrementally deliver ROI during the course of a project. This requires a commitment to defining a minimum viable product, which also has the added benefit of preventing over engineered software before receiving end-user feedback. This user feedback is not only valuable in grooming the product backlog, but is also an incredibly valuable change management and user adoption tool.

Sprint demos and daily standups are not unique to the Scrum process and are concepts that I have used in many projects. I have found great value in the sprint retrospective given my firm belief in continuous feedback and evaluation process. Sitting down as a team following every sprint demo allows for candid conversation about what we are doing well and what we need to improve upon; greatly increasing the growth and productivity of the team.

Front-End Web Developer

After spending the early part of my career as a power-user and a business analyst, I gained a true appreciation for powerful and intuitive software. Over the last two years, I have been a member of a team of developers tasked with transitioning from legacy Windows forms to web applications. This project became a perfect greenfield opportunity that began by digesting as much as we could about the seemingly endless frameworks available. By this time I had immersed myself in JavaScript, including building proof of concept applications using EXTJS, KnockoutJS, Durandal, and AngularJS. The web front-end of our new application is an entirely new tech stack that leveraged an existing SQL Server infrastructure. We also concurrently undertook the writing of a REST API to ultimately be consumed by numerous applications.

This project ultimately catapulted my interest in development and led to my full time role as a Front-End Web Developer. I am a lifelong learner and indebted to some of the great minds that are so generously sharing their knowledge and ideas in forums and open source software. I have found a true passion that requires all my problem solving, analytical thinking, and attention to detail to be successful. AWESOME!