Professional Experience

Nu Skin: July 2015 - Present

Programmer Analyst I to Senior Software Engineer

I began my time at Nu Skin July 2015 as a front end developer (Promgrammer Analyst I) focused on HTML and CSS in AngularJS applications as well as AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) components. I began working more with JavaScript while working on the AngularJS applications. I continued to gain experience working with Polymer and Vue as our platforms and architectural direction changed.

At the time we moved away from Polymer because Google stopped support, I converted our CSS Polymer modules into a SCSS library meant to cover all of our global styles. It was written in such a way that our Vue components and apps could add the library as a dependency and import specific styles or use a generated CSS file that included global CSS custom properties that could be used across our website.

In July of 2021 I joined a new Platform team meant to provide tools for other internal developers. I was originally told that I was needed for building an internal developer portal because of my years of experience working on the front end, but that quickly changed when priorities changed. Our team was asked to convert several Mulesoft applications to AWS Lambda as a cost cutting measure as well as to meet updated architectural standards at the company. I entered this area without any previous experience writing services. Thankfully for me, the company was writing Lambdas using NodeJS so going from JavaScript on the front end to JavaScript on the back end really wasn't that big of a stretch. Because of my experience on this team I became a full-stack JavaScript developer.

After spending quite a while exclusively on the back end, I was eventually tasked with building the internal developer portal that I originally put on the team for. The developer portal was built with NextJS and React. For most of the front end base components we used Material UI for speed and MUI's great base of components. For content we used Contentstack for our headless CMS. Another engineer wrote a library that is used to publish data to Contentstack when our code pipelines run after changes are made and commited. I also added Nextra for documentation on things like how to get AWS SSO access and our standards for things like TBD (trunk based development) and code commit message standards.

The last major feature I added to the developer portal was an GenAI chatbot. The chatbot uses Amazon Bedrock for retrieving and generating answers to questions about our software, standards, and code ownership. I wrote scripts to gather the same kinds of data we are fetching for the developer portal and then generated Markdown files with things like tables with statistics and notes on technologies our code projects use. For each of these files my code also generates metada files that are used by Amazon Bedrock to assist in understanding the data being provided. These generated files are then uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket and a knowledge base within Bedrock points to it. Without going into too much detail, this allows developers, managers, security personel, and other internal employees to be able to ask questions about our software and find the answers they seek.

This internal use case was our first go at trying to understand GenAI and how it can benefit us as a company. I continue to work in the GenAI space as we move forward with updated priorities and expanded architecture.

Software Technology Group (STG): March 2015 to July 2015

Front End Developer

I was hired by STG as a contract to hire position at Nu Skin. Nu Skin was in need of another developer comfortable with HTML and CSS and STG found me while I was between jobs. My time with STG was basically the beginning of my time a Nu Skin and those details are included above.

Wake Up Now: March 2014 to December 2014

Front End Developer

Wake Up Now was an MLM start up doing about $2 million in revenue when I was hired. The development team was very small. The website was built using PHP and they were looking for help on the front end, especially with responsive web pages. They were also looking for a junior develolper willing to learn PHP. This was my first full-time development job. In addition to writing HTML, CSS, and PHP, I also got my first taste of JavaScript, but that was mostly in the form of jQuery. Unfortunately, my stay there only lasted about nine months because the business struggled and eventually closed it's doors.

Robert Half Technology: September 2013 to October 2013, November 2013 to February 2014

Front End Developer - Contractor at Provo Craft

My time with Robert Half Technology at Provo Craft consisted of two different short-term contracts. I really didn't have much meaningful experience writing any kind of code at this point. I was actually told that Provo Craft was originally going to select another individual that had quite a bit more experience than me, but I had tested higher in the assessment given to me my Robert Half.

My time was spent working on the website getting ready for the launch for their new Cricut machine at the time, the Explore. After a very brief first contract working on the website, the UX team needed someone to come in and do some HTML and CSS on the new Cricut Design Space web app built on Knockout. I really didn't touch the knockout code, my job was just the HTML and CSS.

Red Olive: May 2013 to June 2013

HTML/CSS Intern

This very short internship lasted from the beginning of May till the end of June of 2013. I'll admit that I had a terrible interview and I'm confident that had my brother-in-law not been there at the company, I never would have been given a chance. This was the first time anyone had ever paid me to write HTML and CSS. The only experience I had up until this point was what I had learned in school and what I had explored on my own. I didn't accomplish anything amazing, but what I did learn was that writing code was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.