Profiles

Web developer, product manager, solutions architect, public speaker, mentor, volunteer, and non-profit board member in Austin-ish, Texas. Back in the day, I could just say “webmaster” …

Yup, I “do” Agile. I’ve mentored a number of college students during their internships, and believe that leadership is about much more than “management” – it’s about empathy, learning, and sharing knowledge.

I love front-end things like Node.js, React.js, JavaScript/ES6, SPAs, HTML5, CSS3/SASS/LESS, and responsive web design using a gaggle of popular frameworks & libs. I have a mastery of WordPress, and love a good regex challenge.

End-to-end testing gives confidence to developers and leaders alike. I recently presented both a talk and workshop in London on the topic, and I’d love to share more!

And I also do back-end things, like .NET, PHP, MS SQL/MySQL/NoSQL databases, and APIs of all kinds. I’ve built high-availability Linux clusters in Rackspace, AWS and Digital Ocean, so digging into Nginx, Apache httpd, Memcached and Varnish doesn’t scare me one bit.

I ♥ open source and contribute where I can.

Deep knowledge of digital design, user experiences, and tools like Photoshop and Illustrator allow me to build things that are more than functional – they’re beautiful. I constantly think about things like SEO, content structure, web performance, and app analytics.

I’ve attended multiple Human Factors Int’l courses in omni-channel UX and PET design. Recently I spoke at the Austin WordCamp Developer Conference on hosting WordPress in the cloud. And while at Dell, Inc. I earned Yellow and Green belts in project management under their PMI-led Business Process Improvement program.

I dig live music, flying single-engine aircraft, and photography. Designing for people is my passion, code is my craft, non-profit is my devotion. I’m a native Austinite, which feels like a rare breed these days.

gkn