This has been a post long in the works.

After a layoff towards the end of 2025 I began examining my career. What am I doing? Where am I going? Will AI steal my job? Am I going to leave any kind of beneficial mark? Looking back on life during the course of my professional career and grappling with the answers to these questions, and in cases just grappling with the basis of a question, I found myself unable to move the post forward. I think I’ve gotten enough from analyzing my career and am looking to take what I’ve managed to acknowledge with me into the future.

Recent AI scares, mass layoffs, and the general state of the world have many of my peers questioning if tech is still for them. Certainly things are unprecedented, but I suppose that’s how time moves. During my reflections, I’ve decided that for now, despair isn’t an option I’m considering. I am choosing to go deeper. I am choosing to expand my technical skills. I am choosing to understand the soft skills of the industry. AI, or something else may eventually catch me, but not today.

Reflections and Gratitude

The self-made man is a myth. None of us are where we are without others.

Academia

Before permanently relocating to Denver I had completed my Masters in Accountancy at University of Idaho. Prior to this I completed a Bachelors of Accountancy at Brigham Young University - Idaho. I had high expectations for myself based on my academic performance.

Things in accounting did not turn out the way I expected. I quickly realized misaligned incentives, that getting work done fast and at high quality did not result in better outcomes for the company, nor myself. The longer I spent on any given project, the more money the business made; consulting. Lastly, financial results to the benefits of my clients did not result in beneficial results for me. I found a client 40M in unused deductions, 7M of which could be used. I was earning ~60k/year. I was denied a promotion, and to add salt to the wound all my peers were in disbelief. They thought I was joking with them when I told them I was not promoted.

An executive could tell I wasn’t excited by what was happening in my career. During a 1:1 the executive told me “you need to take control of your career”. A pretty straight-forward recommendation, but it struck me like lightning. I decided that day that I would no longer work in accounting and that I had to chase something I cared about.

I spent the next year and a half working every evening and weekend on either a coding project or going to tech meetups. I knew absolutely nothing, and was surely regularly embarrassing myself, except that I didn’t know enough to know I was. After building enough momentum, knowledge, no shortage of luck and someone taking a chance on me, I was able to interview for a data engineering agency.

Career

Datalere

Marc Beacom and Carlos Bossy gave me a shot. I remember the interview being some data design of a relational database, given on paper; what a blast. I had kind and much more experienced co-workers during my time at Datalere. Adam, Kara, Gabe, and more all taught me a ton and gave me opportunities to learn. After some time, things kind of dissolved and I was in some senses, last man standing. The company continues today and does great work, but I knew there was something else for me.

Thank you to Marc, Carlos and everyone that gave me an opportunity and chance at this industry. You all believed in me and the years I’ve enjoyed, will enjoy, and the people I’ve met and will meet can be attributed to you. Without this opportunity, I can’t imagine where I’d be.

Devetry

I was active in the local Denver Developer scene. There were so many passionate, involved, kind and hard working people; so many people I admired. Several of them worked at Devetry, and I wanted to learn from them.

Devetry was growing their team, and I took the opportunity to interview. I performed terribly, but they still took me in. I had the opportunity to work on some fascinating front end projects and got to learn and grow. David Bressan was wildly patient and helped me as I learned on the job to implement projects for clients.

I underwent a significant life event that made me realize I wasn’t long for the agency world, and that I wanted to explore more and take on more challenges. I did an evaluation of “backend” languages. Go had a vibrant community. The ethos of it’s founders spoke to me and I set out to learn it.

Thank you Allan, Brett, Stephan, Daniel, Lee, Cass and many others for welcoming me at Devetry and supporting me.

WalMart

I have no idea how I weaseled my way into this opportunity. As part of the interview process I wrote a chatroom app. I had no idea what I was doing but somehow stumbled through making it work.

I remember clearly traveling to the Walmart Labs HQ in San Bruno for my orientation. I got to work on some extremely interesting and experience expanding projects, all with extremely experienced and supportive folks at my back; Jamison, Michael, Gabe, Troy, & Mike.

Looking back, it now feels like a dream that I was there. I sometimes regret not having stayed longer; that it would have been somewhere I could have stayed sane for a long time. However, I knew I still wanted to learn more and do bigger things, as things became somewhat ‘maintenance’ mode for me.

Thank you Jamison, Troy, Michael, Gabe and Mike for your patience during my awkward teenage years in tech. Thank you to gently leading me to aspects of technology I never would have known without your mentorship and allowing me to just be around.

Moov

My first major career leap happened at Moov.io. When I was looking for my next career steps while at WalMart I found someone sharing an open position for a Denver based fintech in the Gopher slack. I got chatting with Graham and felt like I had gotten incredibly lucky. We would be building in the open, and changing how payments are accessed by developers to make payments easier.

My little team would be responsible for developing the core of the payment platform, the ledger. It was a pleasure to spend time researching, creating PRDs, and getting them reviewed. Through this process and believing I had a better design that wasn’t chosen, I’ve learned the value of qualifying and communicating design.

Most memorable was pairing with JJ, our architect. Being around JJ and discussing technical topics was a joy. He worked to understand my viewpoint, present alternatives and guide me to better choices. It was from these conversations I really started to think more deeply about topics like cohesion, coupling, dependencies, distribution, etc.. All things I sort of knew about or worked with but didn’t have descriptors for.

Due to disagreements with the business leadership, my time was short at Moov. I put a lot of energy into the project there, and when it was taken away from me, I was quite angry. Looking back, the separation was just. I’ve learned how to better raise disagreements and balance concerns for the best outcomes.

Thank you to JJ for helping me along in my career; for your patience and support.

NTWRK

My second major technical career leap happened at NTWRK. I was on the money team, responsible for lots of things - such as inventorying, orders, payments, and other odds and ends. Alex was the Staff Engineer on the team and provided plenty of guidance that helped me along. I got exposure to things like kubernetes, deeper work with containerization, a more proper services/microservices architecture, event driven architecture, and work on improving various architectural characteristics such as elasticity and general scalability.

When Alex passed away, it landed pretty hard and in an odd turn presented a vacuum that I attempted to step in and fill. It feels odd that some of my biggest career growth came as a result in some ways with someones passing. I feel a mixture of guilt, and gratitude.

I was able to work on large-impact projects, such as correcting our incorrect inventory counts, fixing up our payments system, and building an alternative to using Shopify as our backend for orders and more. While I did get to lead on these projects, Doug, Daniel, and Jasper were instrumental in decisions and they’re how I know that quality and speed can coexist. Iteratively architecting, designing, implementing, and testing with these folks was a joy. Our manager allowed us to stay focused on the project(s), our PM clarified everything and provided excellent support.

Eventually, sadly, things changed; we had built some of the most awesome tech in my career thus far, including to the date of writing. Things scaled, services hummed, data was made. Even though the company is now in a different form, the friendships remain. I’m still in close contact with many many of the folks from NTWRK.

Thank you to Alex, Doug, Daniel, Jasper, Andrew, the Nicks, Cat, the Daves, Andy, Arjun, Marko, and lastly Fred 🩷. This was by far the tightest knit group of empowered engineers I’ve worked with.

Pryon

After NTWRK I feel like I had finally gotten to a place where I was competent enough that I could take most requests and deliver something acceptable. I wanted to work on challenging problems and give back. At the same time generatine inference had started taking off and I was interested in a company called Pryon. What most attracted me was the founder Igor Jablokov. Through the interview process I talked to many engineers and leaders I was very impressed with.

Things were a bit unfocused, and there were competing priorities which resulted in missed communications and long lead times on things that were ultimately delivered in a way that weren’t needed. Regardless of this I got to work with some amazing engineers and learnt a lot about platform software in hybrid and scif deployments. I felt I wasn’t able to contribute in the ways most beneficial to the business.

I was quite burnt out. I thought it would be great to work with some trusted friends.

Thanks to Steve, Chris, Warren, Sachi, and everyone else who helped me navigate my time at Pryon and learn more about the industry.

Ghost

Ghost was a company with a lot of folks from NTWRK. I thought this would be a great place to stretch into different technical skillsets in a familiar industry and with coworkers I enjoyed. I learned a lot about SDLC and how it can make or break the strategic efforts a company is making. I got to spend a lot of time with engineering management to better understand how communication does and doesn’t happen. After a series of layoffs I was eventually effected.

Thanks to Marko for yet another opportunity, to Andy, Gary, Alex, Dave, Kelwen, Logan, Rachel, Ryans and more.

Verse

I am currently at Verse, inc. In the short time I’ve been here I’ve experienced the most fulfilling work I’ve done yet. Things are so good that on occasion I experience forboding joy. Time will tell the story of Verse, but I am expecting great things and am so very grateful that I get to be a part of it.

Thanks to the whole team here.

Acknowledgements

I’ve been made in large measure by those around me. I’m grateful for all the experiences I’ve had through now and look forward to making more. Many people have given my opportunities and enabled me to grow and I think it’s now the time for me to make these opportunities and enable grwoth for others.

Thank you.