My introduction to software development began at an early age. In 5th grade my dad bought me my first domain name and handed be a copy of Dreamweaver. After shaping small corners of the Internet, I fell in love with technology.

I designed websites to help pay for college, and after graduating, I pursued a career in technical support and later content marketing for Raven, an SEO platform for marketers.

Things were great until I discovered I wasn't learning new things at the pace I'd like. That changed when I enrolled in Nashville Software School. I rediscovered my love of creating web experiences, and I learned how deep the rabbit hole went.

It turns out my winding path to software development has served me well. Putting a customer's needs first comes naturally after working at two Nashville software companies for more than 8 years.

3 Featured Coding Projects

1. Player Count

Player Count is an iOS app that helps you scan board games in your BoardGameGeek collection to see which are best at different player counts.

How The App Works

BoardGameGeek is a social network for board games. You can use it to keep track of you board game collection. Player Count makes it easy to find which of your games you should play next. During a game night, the first question is "What are we playing?" To answer that question you need to know which games play best at different player counts

Say you have King of Tokyo marked as owned on BoardGameGeek. Since only 20% of gamers recommend King of Tokyo at 2 players, you wouldn’t see that recommendation. But 88% of gamers recommend it at 3 players so you would see that recommendation.

Player count makes an API call to BoardGameGeek and retrieves all the details about your board game collection. Then it makes separate API calls for each of your games to analyze player count polls on the website.

2. BrewJudge

BrewJudge is a native iOS app built in Swift that allows you to train to become a Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) beer judge. This was the first app I built.

How The App Works

First you select a beer and rate it in various categories such as aroma, appearance, and flavor. You assign up to 50 points. Then you see how closely your scores stack up against certified beer judges. The app is powered by an API I built for this app using the Django REST Framework.

3. Tabletop Tracker

Tabletop Tracker tracks which new board games deserve your attention among the thousands of games that are published each year.

How The App Works

Tabletop Tracker is deployed on Heroku using Express. A cron job triggers a crawler that runs daily. The crawler is built atop node packages simplecrawler and cheerio. After crawling BoardGameGeek, the app makes API calls, manipulates data, and pushes up data to Firebase all while server-side.

Since data is cached daily, when a user visits the website, all board game data can be pulled down with one request. Learn more about Tabletop Tracker on Meeple Mountain or on episode 129 of The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast (skip to 2:09:20).

Experience and Education

	Mobile App Developer (2017-current) Most days I'm building out native iOS apps in Swift for various clients, but I occasionally touch projects in Java, Objective-C, and JavaScript.
	Software Developer (2016-2017) My 6-month NSS Bootcamp focused on JavaScript, Python, Git, SQL, unit testing, and much more.
	Content Marketing Specialist (2011-2016) While at Raven, I did everything from customer support, social media marketing, run the affiliate program, and content marketing. Content marketing projects involved writing and speaking about online marketing and creating SEO-friendly websites using Zurb Foundation.
	Director of Technical Support (2008-2011) As the Director of Technical Support at Sitemason, I managed the needs of 500+ clients. I primarily helped clients troubleshoot DNS, hosting, email, and content management issues.
	Web Designer, Founder (2004-2010) I founded a web design company called Diving Board in college. We invoiced dozens of clients. Most projects started with Photoshop mock-ups and were build in PHP or HTML.
	Coordinator of Teenedge.com (2003-2005) Starting in high school, I coordinated a website for Nashville youth at Oasis Center. In my role, I taught high schoolers skills in basic HTML and journalism. I also managed marketing outreach for the program.
	Journalism Student (2004-2008) I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in journalism. While at Belmont, I produced around 50 stories for NPR-affiliate, Nashville Public Radio (WPLN).