I started out at the University of Utah, there I was studying business administration. This was right around the time of the recession in 2008. I was trying to get a job, some sort of manager or product manager role and It wasn't going super great. I had two semesters left and I took my first information systems course and a professor there really inspired me. From there I ended up using all of my electives that time to study more information systems and ended up going on to doing the master of science in information systems. I took some courses in security as well as data management. A friend in the program actually got me my first job out of college at Intermountain Healthcare as a business intelligence developer. That job involved a lot of writing sequels. It involved a lot of using tools like Tableau and Cognos to create analytics and data visualizations for internal customers. While I was there, there were a number of people who went from Intermountain Healthcare to start up in Salt Lake City called Health Catalyst, which tries to do data warehousing at scale. I followed some of my friends over there and did the same sort of work, but with a different text back. Instead of using Oracle databases and tableau predominantly I was using a click as the front and visualization tool on the back end. They had Microsoft sequel server so a lot of similar stuff, a bit more client-facing. I would travel to client sites. They had a shift in the technology stack, and they were interested in having some more Web developers. I had expressed my manager at the time that sometimes I like using the BI tools but sometimes I get frustrated with them because you can't do everything right. They have their limitations, they allow you to do like a bar chart really fast but they don't allow you to do anything that your customer may want. I expressed that interested in learning what development on. So that point I actually shifted from being a business intelligence developer to being a software engineer and started working on some Web applications. Primarily with .NET, C sharp on the back end and angular JavaScript on the front end. After I had been there for a while the company was growing and there were some issues growing at scale. When I had changed my title to software engineer I started getting a lot of recruiters. I don't really like to change jobs very much but I just came up with a rule. I was like, All right, here's what I'm going to have as my salary, I want to be able to work from home full time and there are some of the cultural attributes of the organization I'd like to have. So whenever a recruiter sent me a message, I said can you meet these criteria? I made the switch in 2018 to the company I'm currently at, WellSky. Here I am a senior software engineer. I worked for about full time and they meet my salary expectations. That's kind of how I got where I am. I started out in the business intelligence arena and ultimately moved to software engineering.

The responsibilities and decisions I handle at work have mostly to do with creating new features for the software we work on. To give you a taste of what my team does here we are the Applied Insights Team. So we work very closely with data scientists to create real time predictions. Wellsky is in the post acute healthcare space. One of the applications we've built is for hospitals. We've actually created an algorithm that is based on data input from the HR. It allows us in real time to assess someone's risk of mortality in the next seven days. My responsibilities within that are to create real time data pipeline that gets data out of the HR. From one microservice we make a request to a separate microservice that has the data science models in it. From there we can return those models to the front end and do some real-time prediction and analytics. My job is to mostly create that data pipeline and also to create those front end futures to make it look snazzy. The hours I spend in the office weekly is zero. I work from home 100% of the time. I work about 40 hours a week. That's something that is a fun surprise about software engineering there are highs and lows, peaks and valleys but for the most part, I do have a pretty good work life balance of about 40 hours a week. As far as travel goes because we are remote we do get together once or twice a year for like a conference or just a face to face meeting, so I don't do a whole lot of travel.

For the most part I write C sharp, .net core and then also on the front end Javascript. Angular is pretty close alluded to a typescript, which allows for type safety and JavaScript, which is cool. Those were the languages I use the most for real-time message streaming. We've been using Kafka and that's been quite the pleasure to use. Actually it's amazing how fast we can stream messages with that. As far as frameworks go we use angular. There are some other front and frameworks like react and Vue. I think angular is very opinionated. So you get in and get everything when you use angular. So you have a router by default to you. You have a lot of those decisions you have to make with react just more of a library and you have all the decisions already made for you, which can be nice as your team grows. That's actually why I would lean towards angular is is because of the opinions that have out of the box as your team skills a lot of those decisions about code organization, and architecture are pretty easy to make versus with some of the other frameworks of libraries you might use on the front end. You might be shooting yourself in the foot if you don't make the right decisions upfront. That being said, there are some great tools for React like create a React App that allows you to get some of the same experience you get out of the angular CLI. As far as languages go like on our team we don't tend to focus on the deep syntactical differences between languages. We tend to prefer Polyglot programmers. People who can generally pick up anything and that has some benefits in the sense of legibility. If you don't focus on those deep syntactical features of a given language and you focus on some of the things that are a bit more accessible to someone with maybe a Java background, Java and C sharp and are very similar, then you don't have to worry so much about being so deep into one language. So for that reason, I don't have a strong preference for any given language. I've tended to be more in the Microsoft staff, just based on the places I have worked with but I would be definitely open to using some of the other tools.