I grew up in a small town, went to a small town high-school. I was more than excited to have the option to take a Visual Basic class as a freshman. It was lucky that there were enough interested kids when I was a junior for the school to offer another. With my two programming classes under my belt, knowing that they were my favorite classes, deciding on a college major seemed straight forward.

I started my undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I went through a year of this program, during which I felt extremely inadequate. I felt I was learning at a slower pace than my peers. I would struggle for a week to complete an assignment that my dorm-mates would finish, using a more eloquent solution, in an hour, at 10pm, the night before it was due. I decided part-way through that first year that I was not a Computer Scientist, and put a plan in place to change my major. I worked diligently through structures, fluids, thermodynamics, design, and controls classes. The only ones that resonated were the controls classes that led me to a flight simulation club where I saw a lot of exciting code that was way over my head in technical content. It was my first step in the recurring phenomenon that has shaped my life since then; I keep working my way back to coding.

I started as an Assembler at my first job out of college at a small aircraft parts manufacturing business. In the 2 years I was there, I ended up redoing their website. I had no training or experience in web design. It was a simple static HTML page, and nothing to be really proud of, but among the other things I learned in that job, I was back to doing some coding.

My second job, the company I still work for, was at Trust Automation as an "Engineering Assistant". I was a buyer, responsible for data input into our ERP system, and did some work setting up standard work instructions. Through that work I was able to demonstrate skills for understanding workflow and procedures, which allowed me to work my way into a larger role developing process, documentation, and instructional material as a Manufacturing Engineer.

In 2012, I offered to be the primary point of contact in Trust's new ERP system implementation and I dove head-first into that coding draw. Since then I've learned to develop custom database solutions in the native database scripting language (FOP). There is need at my company to perform certain tasks in a mobile environment. My current project is to develop a company wide web-app as a front end UI to our database. Myself and one other coworker are just starting to learn and build an Angular app. I'm working at learning TypeScript, Angular, and the rxjs and ngrx libraries. Learning computer science is still difficult for me, but having an end goal; the app I know will benefit my company, makes learning interesting and fun.