The Journey So Far
It began in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southern Virginia.
As a kid, I was lucky enough to stumble into programming, spurred by the grinding of two tectonic plates in my life:
- my family's relative poverty
- and my love for video games
Like other nerdy kids in the late 90s/early 00s, I spent my nights fighting dial up to play on the internet (RuneScape and eventually, Maplestory and WoW).
Around then, my dad introduced me to these bizarre stacks of colored squares, which I'd learn were called "Floppy Disks". They were wonderful--many even had little games on them.
The fusion of said plates came when I learned I could write code to create on these silly squares
...and, oh shit. I could sell them to my classmates.
I quickly discovered what a gargantuan effort it was to make games, but boy oh boy could I write RuneScape bots. At 5-10c a disk, they were a hit. (Unfortunately, while I was a budding programmer, my business skills weren't savvy enough to realize that this wasn't the financial genius I thought it would be. And that's a good thing, otherwise I may have never made them in the first place.)
Despite my best efforts, no chump change was going to save my parents' marriage.
However, this was enough to spark my curiosity and charter my course.
From here I ventured to Oberlin College with a vague goal to study computer science. Fortunately, Oberlin (like many liberal arts colleges) was the perfect place for someone like me who had no clue what the fuck they were doing. In 2015, I narrowly earned my Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science. I say narrowly because I was an awful student. I'll spare you the typical coming-of-age details. Stories like this are a dime a dozen--feel free to fill in the gaps.
Suffice it to say that my mediocre grades were a poor reflection of how much I learned. I wouldn't realize that until many years later, though.
Apparently determined to continue the theme of general wanderlust, I followed the winds with close friends to Madison, WI. I came armed with 4 years of deep and mostly useless experience repairing printers, laptops, and desktops, a gallery of side projects, games, and half-finished apps, the emotional undertow of a guttering and newly long distance relationship, a mild caffeine addiction, and my minted degree in theoretical problem solving.
In other words, I was ready for a Real Midwestern existential crisis. (By the way, if you're looking for a place to have an existential crisis, look no further than the sub-zero, snow covered lakecity of Madison.)
Eventually, I quit the lackluster IT job I worked upon arrival, ran out of money, and by the summer of '16 fled home for some soul searching. I spent that summer helping my family fix up my childhood home, intent to sell. There's a stereotype that returning home is a "bad thing", a uniquely western cultural faux pas. Growing up, I wanted nothing more than to be out of my hometown, far from the chaos of a broken family. The surreal blue-green gradient of the Blue Ridge Mountains was a noisy vignette in my rearview mirror.
But on coming back? Holy shit. Imagine those mountains after living in the flat, unchanging midwest for 5 years.
And so I began healing.
After a summer of hard labor, I rekindled my love for programming, returned to Madison, and landed a gig as an instructor at a (bougie) tech summer camp. Therein I found an unexpected love for teaching. I remember thinking there was nothing greater than the glow of a kid hacking their first game or website together. Maybe I remembered myself in that glow.
That propelled me into the next couple years working for a local non-profit where I taught girls and students of color programming, CS, and the like. At night I dawned the cloak of my other unexpected hobby-turned-profession: bartending. It's hard to explain the simple joy of mixing cocktails, sweating through a rush, and learning how to strike up a conversation with literally anyone. I won't attempt it in this post, but I will say the juxtaposition of physically taxing work (tending bar) and mentally taxing work (teaching) turns out to be a good for the soul. The combination was humbling--the kind of work you could do quietly for the rest of your life and still learn something new each day.
But eventually I got restless.
When I originally left Oberlin, I spurned my CS colleagues for their near-obsessive desire to interview and work at FANG companies. It simply wasn't for me at the time. However, the more I taught others to code, the more I found myself wondering what I was missing. I had never really spent time in "big tech", only small, comfortingly-adjacent tech.
And to be clear, I still had little desire to work at a FANG (though I did eventually interview and was rejected twice). Rather, I wanted to see complex software at scale. I told myself it was purely to become a better teacher, but that was a lie.
Around that time I met my wife-to-be and promptly fell in love (we met at a vegan pizza party/activism event, which should tell you a lot about us). The early flames of our relationship stoked my ambition, and in late 2018 we said our farewells to Madison.
Still firmly in the grip of the midwest (it really never lets go), we moved to a quaint apartment in downtown Columbus, OH. My wife had family in the area, and I landed a good job as a software engineer at a massive energy enterprise.
The work was boring. Actually, boring is understating--it was surreally mundane. The 30+ floors of corporate office layout, the cubicles filled with passwords on sticky notes, the absolute bastardization of "agile", the red tape to doing anything slightly interesting, the cafeteria cliques, the water cooler conversations. I always assumed that Office Space was mostly satire, but it turns out it's a documentary.
Honestly, I couldn't complain. The pay was more than I ever dreamed of as a poor southern kid, I never thought about work after work, and it scratched the itch I had for hairy, complex software at scale. But it was profoundly unfulfilling. Most of the people I worked with had been there for over a decade. Many aimed to retire there, and they were content. I was not.
Toward the end of my time there the pandemic was just ramping up. I had (thankfully) been asked to work from home. I had also moved to a smaller team doing more modern frontend work, which is where my interests always were. No more IE11 support, and my coworkers had at least heard of ES6. I learned the enterprise arts of navigating bureaucracy, legacy systems, and corporate tribalism. More importantly, I learned what I didn't want: to be another cog.
Everything changed in the Fall of 2020 when my wife announced she was pregnant. Life started moving real fast. Over the following 12 months I:
- got married to my amazing partner outside of the downtown Columbus courthouse on a sunny day...
- left my corporate job for an e-commerce "startup". It wasn't actually a startup, but the engineering team was entirely new. Actually, this was the second fully new engineering team in two years. Somehow I missed this red flag. I traded corporate stability for the lavish chaos of modern tooling, frameworks, and building fast. I learned a lot about limits here. By the end of 2021, my teammates and I followed in the footsteps of the first two teams and left...
- welcomed my first daughter and discovered that no experience could possibly top hearing her laugh...
- bought my first house...
- and started a new job at GoodRx as a Lead Software Engineer on what would become the Frontend Platform team.
And that brings us to the current arc. I've grown rapidly in my role at GoodRx, championing simplicity, fun, and quality engineering. GoodRx has constantly kept me learning at the edge of my abilities, but in a way that is managable. I had a brief stint as a manager before deciding that I wanted to be close to the code (exciting times in frontend these days). Technical leadership remains more exciting to me than management.
Today I continue my role as Principal Software Engineer at GoodRx on the Frontend Platform team, doing what I can to build quality experiences and tools for our engineers and users alike.
On a personal front, my party grew from 3 to 4 recently, as we welcomed our second daughter in September of '24.
And so the journey continues, from those Blue Ridge Mountains to wherever the winds may lead. If you've enjoyed this chapter of the lore, there's plenty more to explore in the rest of the grimoire.
“The most important step a man can take. It's not the first one, is it? It's the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar.” — Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer