With the recent rise of LLM's and various flavors of AI I have found myself in a position to not only utilize it in my workflow but actively incorporate it as a feature in several projects. In one project I was given an AI query application written in typescript and running on a pinecone database. I was tasked with taking the underlying technology and refactoring it to utilize a PostgreSQL database using pg-vector and laravel to query with ChatGPT.

In another project with a similar setup, we were able to enable the site to be queried in Spanish without having to... Read More

I have worked with php my entire career and many many years before it started in earnest. The first language I ever learned to code in was php and I fell in love the first time I captured form data. Its weird to think of it on such a basic level, but the first time I realized I could take user input and do something with it behind the scenes, it was like spotting how the magic trick was done.

At this point I have spent 20 years working with php but I still learn new things every now and... Read More

In my career I have only held one position title that included operations, but every full-stack developer has some experience. In my career I have been fortunate enough to manage and maintain many applications and services across several well-known stacks.

At Springbot where my role was more focused towards operations, we worked primarily with Heroku for our backbone. In addition to Heroku, we managed several stacks on EC2 and AWS but my time with eMeals had me far more invested in the AWS ecosystem. While there I created cloudFormation scripts to facilitate blue / green deployments. In addition to... Read More

My eCommerce experience while wide is not very deep. In my time at Springbot I was regularly required to debug our plugins and make changes on many platforms (WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento). I was not the primary developer for these platforms and filled a role more akin to maintenance or bugfixing.

At their core all of these platforms require php or JavaScript which are things I have a deep knowledge of. My roles dealt a lot with the structure of data and the conditions by which it transforms, both of which are critical skills for working on these platforms.

... Read More

My laravel experience started back with laravel 8. In my time at BlackAirplane, it was a favorite for many of the client projects we worked on due to how quick and simple it was to get going. Not to mention the huge amount of resources dedicated to its development. I have worked with laravel through 11 now and find it to be very useful for quick turn-around.

In addition to the traditional blade frontend, I have also developed multiple projects with vue as well as react through the use of laravel breeze. I have worked with several of the spatie libraries... Read More

Python development has long been an area where I hope to improve. Over the years my skills have certainly lost their polish, but they remain in-tact. One of my earliest projects was a python3 php file parser. Intended as a simple way to extract comments for use in a web base wiki, it was a fun project that taught me a lot. Most recently (2020) I had the pleasure of building out a lambda function for ip lookups. While small, the project was a great reminder of how much fun the language is.

My lua experience while limited is currently very fresh. In November I built and add-on for the massively popular online game "World of Warcraft". The game provides an in-game api and allows users to build interfaces in lua that interact with that API to expand game functionality. Its a small exploration but I have every intention of expanding on and improving the add-on in the coming months.

Full stack developer is somewhat implied for all of the positions listed on my resume. In this industry I have met very few people who wouldn't fall into that category, but its not wrong. From the earliest days of the internet I have had a website or multiple. Usually hosted on the cheapest provider I could find and with little to no support to speak of. In my career I have worked mostly with small companies and startups. In the environment where no-one is an expert, you have to have a working knowledge of just about everything.

Personally, I have never been a great student. I obtained my high school Diploma in 2010, the same year I began community college in pursuit of a Computer Science degree. After two years of college, i dropped out without completing my degree.

As a developer, I am entirely self taught. While traditional education eludes me, I have always been incredibly capable in pursuits I turn my attentions to. I have continued my personal education for 34 years, continuing to learn new languages and methods as well as improving the multitude of skills I have obtained throughout my life and career. ... Read More

One of the more recent certifications I have obtained throughout my career was the Stripe Professional Developer Certification. If you are unfamiliar with Stripe, they are a large payment processor with some great people and excellent development tools. As part of my Client work with Black Airplane, I built out several stripe payment portals for various needs. Feel free to review my Stripe Professional Developer Certificate.

... Read More

Let's be honest, its not like this will be a surprise, but i have worked with version control for a while now. I do not claim to be a guru, or the go-to git-guy, but I can manage my way around inits, clones, and basic operation through command line. In addition to git I have used SVN in the past though it get rustier with each passing year.

I have a fair understanding of deployment scripts and automation though its not something I find much practice for. I have managed my own gitlab publicly for a while now in... Read More

I always feel like "cloud" is such a buzzword.... Everything not in my room is the cloud. With that said, the most directly applicable experience to list here would be my AWS experience using and implementing cloudFormation scripts for blue/green deploys. I also had a bit of experience managing users, permissions, and policies. I was also responsible for establishing proper metrics for cloudWatch alerts to relevant members of the team.

Throughout my career I have had the opportunity to work with many databases and types. Sql, no-sql, vector, relational, I have some experience with most database technologies in use. Between the various types, there are dozens of providers, many of which I have worked with in one capacity or another.

Most recently I learned about working with Pinecone and PgVector for Postres in my efforts to build out internal AI tools. My time with blackairplane also afforded me the chance to work with a graphQL setup from the ground up. I was responsible for building out the database behind the scenes... Read More