A little bit about me...

My professional journey began in March of 2011 as I started in the maintenance shop at CFI Truckload. My position there was working as the paint technician for my shift. My 2 years of studying Collision Repair at Crowder College during High School helped me earn this position. For the next 7 years I would be responsible for painting major wrecks, individual parts, managing inventory and paint booth maintenance. Towards the end of my time as the paint technician at CFI, I began classes at my local college. While going to school, I started utilizing Udemy courses to learn about HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Node.js. After having built a website for myself and for my cousin I became confident enough to apply for a Systems Analyst position at CFI with the encouragement from a friend. I landed an internship where over the next year I would be enrolled in a IBM Concepts and RPG Programming certification program with Impower Technologies founded by Jim Buck.

During my internship, not only did I have to complete the certification program, but I also needed to build a Web Service application used by the developers at CFI. This application would use various technologies, most notably RPG, SQL, HTML, CSS, JS/Jquery and AJAX. The application's main objective was to give dev's the ability to apply/change/remove foreign key constraints from any of the database tables using a web interface for them to input these queries. There needed to be a historical view and from there they could change or remove their query prior to it running on the weekend. The interface had a way of syntax checking and after submission would undergo an approval process where it would get the green light by management before the query ran.

Fast forward a year later, I had completed the certification program with Impower Technologies and released the first version of the constraints application. This showcased my tenacity to learn and my motivation to develop. I was then hired as an EDI Developer for CFI and would spend the next 7 years onboarding new EDI customers, accommodating for changes to existing setups, setting up 3rd party tracking via API with 3rd party vendors, and making programming changes in accordance to any of the aforementioned items.

As an EDI Developer, it's been a wild and rewarding ride. I’ve spent the last 7 years learning, building, and problem-solving. From onboarding new EDI customers, connecting end users with the power of supply chain visibility, setting up server-to-server connections for the transferal of data, maintaining existing codebase and implementing feature updates per requirements, to developing web services that make backend systems more efficient. I’ve never been afraid to dive into something new, and that drive is what got me from picking up HTML, CSS and JavaScript on weekends to coding in RPG and building applications in an enterprise setting.

These days, I’m leaning into Node.js and Python development, staying brushed up on things happening in the IBM world, polishing up my skills in RPG and putting together a portfolio that shows both where I’ve been and where I’m headed. I don’t plan to slow down anytime soon!