From mainframes to modern products.
Ten years from COBOL on an American Express mainframe to designing and building complete products, by way of a layoff, a classroom, and a studio.
American Express · 2015
I did not start on the web. I started on a mainframe, writing COBOL as an intern at American Express.
Eight weeks of dedicated mainframe training, then four months on a team writing COBOL for high-volume transaction programs. It was not glamorous, and that turned out to be the point. Mainframe code runs the parts of a business that cannot be down, on systems that were old before I got there and will outlive anything I have written since. You learn to read code you did not write, change it carefully, and respect the blast radius of a mistake. I still think about software that way. They offered me a job as a junior mainframe engineer when it ended. I took a position elsewhere.
Passport Health · 2016–2017
Finding the web.
That position put me on the web as a front-end developer, working in WordPress. I built page templates used across 250 clinics and the central site, and picked up the unglamorous half of the job along the way: content models, local and organic SEO, analytics, and the small daily negotiation between what a design wants and what a CMS will comfortably do. I liked it immediately, and I learned the publishing side of the web the way you only can by maintaining a real site.
Then I was let go.
Starting over · 2017–2019
Back to being a student.
I enrolled in a web development bootcamp. Going back to a classroom after having had the job is a particular kind of humbling, but it was the right call. I had learned the web through one CMS; I needed the modern JavaScript foundation underneath it: the languages, the frameworks, and the habits that would let me build something from nothing rather than only maintain what already existed.
From there I went to work at a friend’s digital marketing agency. Agency work is a fast teacher. You see a lot of sites, a lot of clients, and a lot of deadlines, and you find out quickly which of your opinions survive contact with a real budget.
Upwork · 2019
Working for myself.
In 2019 I started freelancing, mostly through Upwork. It began as a way to keep building on my own terms and became the thing I was actually suited to: talking directly to the person who needs the work, scoping it honestly, and owning the outcome instead of a ticket.
Nucamp · 2020–present
The other side of the classroom.
In 2020 I ended up back at a bootcamp, this time teaching. I have been an instructor at Nucamp ever since, running a weekly workshop in React, React Native, DevOps, and cybersecurity for people making the same career change I had made a few years earlier.
Teaching changed how I work more than any job before it. You cannot hand-wave in front of a class. If you cannot explain why one approach beats another in plain language, you do not understand it well enough yet, and a room full of students will find the hole in your reasoning before you do. That pressure is why I still write things down the way I do: clear tradeoffs, documented decisions, and a handoff someone else can actually pick up.
Life Sciences Web Studio · 2023–2024
A student, and a partner.
One of my students wanted to try freelancing for real. So we built something together: a studio making websites for the life sciences sector, the two of us working through the parts no curriculum covers: pricing, scoping, saying no, security and compliance, and putting your name on something a client depends on.
I co-owned it for a little over a year. Running a studio with someone you taught is a strange and clarifying experience. Every shortcut you ever demonstrated comes back to you as a question.
Now · Phoenix, Arizona
Why the range matters.
After two years as a full-stack engineer and product designer at City Press Media, I am back to running my own practice, still teaching at Nucamp and taking on product and platform work independently.
The odd shape of this path is the useful part. COBOL taught me to respect systems I did not write. WordPress taught me what editors and content teams actually need. Agency work taught me to scope and finish. Teaching taught me to explain. Running a studio taught me to own the whole outcome.
It means I can sit with a design decision and an infrastructure decision in the same afternoon and understand what each one costs the other. That is the work I want: complete products, designed and built by the same person, taken all the way into production.
Working together