Recent Posts

What I’ve been up to lately

Fake It So You Can Make It

I use Bogus to demonstrate how fake factories can be used to easily create useful, random data, whether it be primitive types or complex objects, for use in testing and non-production data seeding.
Aug 31, 2021 6 min read CSharp, Testing

Agile Myths

These myths, damaging to the Agile movement, are propagated out of negligence of what Agile is - either inadvertently, through laziness, or old-school skepticism - by all types of people at organizations.
Jun 24, 2021 9 min read Agile, Software Craftsmanship

From MVC to Blazor Server

A step-by-step guide to take your MVC project and spice it up with Blazor components - or even Blazor pages!
May 16, 2021 3 min read CSharp, Blazor, DotNetCore

Clean Code - Part III: Comments

Identifying some examples of common patterns and anti-patterns with comments.
Mar 9, 2021 6 min read Software Craftsmanship

Clean Code - Part II: The Four Principles (of Art)

Drawing parallels from the four basic principles of art to bring order to the code we write.
Jan 31, 2021 7 min read Software Craftsmanship
See all posts

Senior Application Developer

Homesteaders Life Company

Biography

My first experience with computers was watching my oldest brother rig up a baud modem to our brand new Windows 1995 computer and play Warcraft II with his friend across town. The resulting thousand-dollar internet bill and my parents anger at my brother taught me nothing - I’ve been hooked on computers ever since.

I currently work as a Senior Application Developer for Homesteaders Life Company in Des Moines.

Outside of work I have a wonderful wife and a daughter. My wife is a superhero because she still loves me even though I’m known to be a dungeon master for Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and puts up with me taking an entire bookshelf (literally) of Warhammer 40k literature.

Interests

  • Web Development
  • DevOps
  • Reading
  • Computer Hardware
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Warhammer 40k
  • Family

Education

  • BA in MIS, 2016

    University of Northern Iowa

  • AAS in Computer Support, 2012

    Kirkwood Community College

Skills

I care a lot about…

.NET Core

I’ve been using .NET Core since its beta release and am always staying on top of the latest release.

Blazor

The new WASM kid on the block - I’ve been following it very closely and have been playing with Blazor since its alpha. I prefer this over Angular or any JavaScript framework.

MVC

The MVC pattern using ASP.NET MVC 5 was my first professional adventure into the world of web development.

Agile

I’m an agile pragmatist, but am convinced it is the best way to build software at this moment.

Software Craftsmanship

I take software craftsmanship very seriously and that means skills beyond just writing code - what it means to be a professional, having pride in my work, etc.

DevOps

I’m passionate about delivering better software faster and avoiding software death spirals.

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Senior Application Developer

Homesteaders Life Company

Aug 2020 – Present Des Moines
Still finding my feet here
 
 
 
 
 

Web Application Developer

Polk County

Aug 2019 – Aug 2020 Des Moines

I am first a full-stack developer starting with gathering requirements/existing workflows through front-end implementation with client acceptance.

On top of this I maintain the CI/CD functionality on our Azure DevOps organization and maintain a ‘Pipelines’ repository with our YAML files, which houses our different strategies for building, testing, and deploying our applications automatically.

I work with team members in a collaborative and agile environment to craft the best software and provide the Polk County employees and residents the most value.

 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer

Casey’s General Stores

Mar 2019 – Aug 2019 Ankeny

I created and led an API strategy for sun setting legacy applications that needed to continue to speak with each other. These were coupled with a few ASP.NET Core websites that were to replace legacy applications.

To deploy these applications, I utilized Azure DevOps for CI/CD for pull requests, merges, and deployment. 

I also largely maintained and refactored legacy applications written in VB.NET, VBScript, and other more long-in-thetooth languages. Finally, I wrote a base web application for Casey’s IT to jump start new development initiatives.

 
 
 
 
 

Associate Web Developer

Polk County

Jun 2016 – Mar 2019 Des Moines
Same as 2019.

Contact