About

I'm a software developer residing in Pampa, TX with my wife Raine and our three children: Noah, Mia & Ari. We are covenant and active members of Redeemer Pampa.

I grew up in Canadian, a small, charming Texas town, and later attended college at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, where I obtained a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. Gig'em.

Today I run Nocta Labs, a studio building websites and custom software for small businesses across the Texas Panhandle, and I maintain V-Calendar, the open source Vue.js calendar plugin I created.

Because my formal education at university was in Electrical Engineering, it wasn't until I entered the workforce that I got hooked on solving real-world problems using software. It was with Microsoft Access that I learned the basics of user interface and database design, to the dismay of IT professionals everywhere.

My full-time role was in engineering, but as I gained more satisfaction from empathizing with fellow employees by listening to their needs and easing their frictions with productivity, I realized that I wanted to feel that reward in a full-time role. It was then that I decided to transform my career into software development.

Making the decision to reset my career was difficult because it meant playing catch-up with my knowledge in the software realm. To close that gap, I began to invest my own time and money by reading recommended books and articles, watching code tutorials and even developing and supporting an iOS application in the App Store. In the end, I decided to bet on myself and the passion I had to impact the daily lives of others.

In 2013, I convinced an oil company to hire me to develop desktop software applications for internal teams and their customer base. Within the research division, I learned how to more effectively connect with people's daily challenges and deliver applications using Windows Forms, WPF and ASP.NET. It was a small team, so I was fortunate to learn how to effectively plan, develop, test and deploy solutions.

Amid the oil downturn in 2016, I was let go from the company due to down-sizing. My wife and I were distraught, as we had made dear friends in our community and the church. Our desire was to stay, but developer jobs were few and far between in this area, so I decided to take small jobs developing websites.

I had to once again reset and learn new languages, design conventions and developer environments. It was during this time that I learned to love the web and everything it provided: an improved developer experience, open source... and even Linux. It motivated me to create this site, share my creations with the world and serve others in ways I never would have thought possible.

Like other developers, my career path has been unique and somewhat unpredictable. Through it all, my mind returns to a single idea that has driven me: the ability to constantly hit refresh with new opportunities and ideas.