My Journey
My career started in the arts world, so I am well acquainted with communicating and collaborating with people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. And it has given me a tremendous amount of empathy for non-technical users. However, the path from under-employed actor/failing real-estate agent to senior-level web developer did not occur overnight. It all started when...
Fish Out of Water
Sometime in 2011
Fed up with the gypsy lifestyle of a theater artist, I was working as a rental agent for a real estate broker in Brooklyn. One day my boss decided that I should make a website for one of our new properties (though I had made no indications that I was able to do so). Not one to back away from a challenge, I obtained a copy of Dreamweaver and a book on HTML. Within a week we had a perfectly horrible little 4 page site on our hands. Lucky for me, it worked out: he paid me a couple hundred dollars and immediately asked for another. This was what those in the world of dramatic literature refer to as the ‘Inciting Incident’.
Freelancing Across America
September 2011 - September 2012
Once I had a solid grasp on the basics, I decided to bounce around the country for a bit: my travels took me from New York to Minnesota then Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maine, up to Alaska, down to Florida, and eventually back to New York. All the while designing and building WordPress sites for anyone at any price - my only concern was that every project gave me the opportunity to learn something new. I made sites for actors, singers, voiceover artists, a chocolatier, service providers in the fracking industry, a moving company, and a cross-dressing Rabbi. I learned many many lessons during this time but the two main takeaways were: 1. that my design capabilities were limited and 2. that I wanted to learn by working beneath someone more knowledgeable than myself.
Meanwhile Back in the City...
Magnet Media Films & King Features Syndicate
September 2012 - February 2013
Upon returning to New York, I immediately obtained a design internship with Magnet Media Films - a video production company based in Manhattan. I was able to contribute to a significant amount of client deliverables in my 3 months there and learned volumes about design for both print and web. To round out my schedule, I began freelancing with King Features Syndicate - the company which manages the rights to just about every comic strip you might be able to think of. Many of the sites were designed by their team, but I was able to put my new design skills to work and contributed designs to almost half of the fifteen sites I did for them. Some of my favorites include Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, and Olive Oyl.
A Different Kind of Agency
Different Perspective
February 2013 - July 2014
During my year of travel, I reconnected with a long time friend from college who convinced me to move back to Florida and become her husband. Well...it may not have played out exactly like that, but that‘s a story for a different time. The important detail is that I returned to Florida, married a fantastic girl named Heather, and began working for a full-service creative agency called Different Perspective. My time at Different Perspective gave me experience with multi language sites, introduced me to the exciting world of ecommerce, and showed me how to manage relationships with clients. It also taught me that taking the time to compose good documentation is a tiny investment up front that saves hours and hours of emails and consultation down the road.
There's No I in Team
Izea & Junyo
July 2014 - February 2016
The agency work was fast paced and exciting, but I felt as though I was missing out by being the only developer in the room. I spent the next two and a half years working with two great teams at Izea and Junyo. I learned the importance of code standards, the fine art of collaboration via GitHub, and the pain of tech debt. I had the opportunity to work with a great variety of technologies including Ruby on Rails, Bootstrap, Django, Backbone, Angular, Highcharts and a little bit of Node. It was truly inspiring to be surrounded by so many people who were committed to pushing their skills further and doing good work.
Ecommerce in the Holy City
Blue Acorn (now Blue Acorn iCi)
February 2016 - December 2018
Seeking an exit from Florida before we started our family, Heather and I felt the pull of Charleston in a big way - the thriving tech scene, active music community, and phenomenal restaurants made it the perfect place to settle down and start a family. Blue Acorn (now Blue Acorn iCi) gave me the opportunity to work on a great team with some high profile clients via the Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform. It was also the first time I worked with proprietary software - instilling within me a profound appreciation for the open source world.
Talking to the Future
XAPPMedia
December 2018 - February 2020
Feeling like I was being left behind by a rapidly evolving industry, I set upon learning React, Redux, and Typescript in my spare time. As soon as I had a firm grasp on them, I sought a position that would elevate my skills beyond jQuery enhanced server-rendered apps. And that is how I found XAPPMedia. XAPPMedia is helping to define what is possible with voice-powered software (Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant). During my time with them, I became thoroughly immersed in the entire lifecycle of the modern development stack: from wireframing and defining requirements, to development and testing, to deployment via CICD and monitoring and triage with observability tooling.
Around the World Around the World
Mokriya (now Nagarro)
March 2020 - September 2020
An opportunity to work with a long-time mentor came up, and I jumped at it. Mokriya is a globally distributed consultancy, and it gave me the chance to contribute to a large-scale internal documentation project for enterprise APIs. Working with teammates across multiple time zones pushed me to become much sharper in written and verbal communication, and taught me how to collaborate effectively when face-to-face time is rare. On the technical side, I leaned heavily on coding standards, automated linters, and consistent review processes to keep our work aligned and maintain a high bar for quality. The experience gave me a deep respect for distributed teams—when the right practices are in place, they can move quickly, build at scale, and feel just as connected as any co-located group.
Hitting the Mark
Mark43
September 2020 - November 2023
After my project with Mokriya was complete, I wanted to work on something big. Like mission-critical, life-saving, make the world a better place, big. Enter Mark43. During my time here, I have learned how to responsibly make significant changes to an app that runs 24/7, the value of mentorship for both the mentor and mentee, what to look for when interviewing candidates, and how to juggle tech debt, user-experience, and just plain getting things done. It was by far the most challenging role I had faced in my career, but also the most fulfilling.
The Next Big Thing
Artisan Studios
November 2023 - This Very Day
I had been tinkering with Next.js and Vercel for a while and wanted to put that curiosity into practice on real projects. That led me to Artisan Studios—a consultancy full of smart, passionate people who are as fun to work with as they are talented. At Artisan, I got deep hands-on experience with both Next.js and AWS, and I had the chance to lead multiple greenfield projects from the ground up. I also worked directly with one of the biggest names in fast-service restaurants (hint: the one whose ads are written by cows). The experience sharpened my technical skills around serverless architecture, modern React workflows, and cloud infrastructure, while also pushing me to grow as a project lead—balancing client expectations, guiding technical decisions, and keeping projects moving smoothly.
