I didn’t plan a career in software. I started with photography, graphic design, picked up HTML and CSS because I needed to build websites for my photography work, and then couldn’t stop pulling the thread. Fifteen years later I’m writing penetration tests and architecting CI/CD pipelines, which isn’t where I expected to end up, but it makes sense in retrospect.
The first few years were generalist work: web design, social media, basic WordPress builds. I learned enough PHP to be dangerous, then learned enough to be useful. Moving into a digital engineering role at PeakTiming was the shift, real databases, NFC systems, data pipelines. That’s when I understood the difference between making something look like it works and building something that actually does.
VML was where I grew up as a backend developer. Large Drupal systems, global clients, real stakes. Working on Nestlé and Johnson Outdoors taught me what enterprise-scale development looks like: zero-downtime migrations, multilingual content at scale, API integrations that have to survive production load. I got my Acquia Drupal 10 and Stripe certifications during that period.
Thornhill Associates is a different kind of challenge. Smaller team, broader scope. I’m not just writing code, I’m building the infrastructure it runs on, securing it, and introducing AI tooling that actually changes how the team works. It’s closer to building something from scratch than maintaining something established, and I prefer that.