About Me
Professional Life
Currently I work for A10 Networks, a mobile and on-premises security company, as a senior front-end web developer. We’re currently on WordPress and considering alternative and options such as staying with WordPress and using GatsbyJS as a front end. This job has made more a more well-rounded developer as I have been able to learn new methods of developing and coding. I love what I do for A10 Networks. I assist with the search engine optimization efforts for the corporate site and I’m a go-to guy for other teams to come to when they need SEO advice for their digital assets. My goal is to grow with this company and progress my career forward into a leadership and mentoring role. I enjoy consulting with people on what a good approach is to creating content that will not only rank well on search, but content that is easily digestible for end users.
Personal Life
I started my family at a very young age, 16 to be exact. I am the father of 3 young men, Aidan, Ian, and Gabriel and I’m a husband to my very supportive wife, Elizabeth. I have no siblings so the friends that I have I consider them to be my family and we are very close. When I’m not spending time with my family and friends, you can generally find me on Twitch streaming whatever video game I feel like playing at the time. I do get out and get active, I go to the gym every morning before work, but I am in now way shape or form a “gym rat”. Outside of all of that I enjoy learning new coding languages and always trying to imropve my skillset.
Education
My junior year in high school, my school offered a web mastering class. SOLD! We started learning how to code HTML using Notepad, a standard text editing application found on every Windows computer. I think about those days where I didn’t know how to structure an HTML document. I had no idea what semantics were. Heck half of the time my stuff didn’t work and I got frustrated. We moved on to Dreamweaver MX after about a month or 2 using Notepad. I’m thankful everyday that I learned in notepad because if I have to do on the fly editing and I’m on a computer that does not have an IDE (integrated development environment) I can comfortably make edits to any number of files and languages in notepad or textedit (mac computers). This was the year that really changed the course of my life. This is where I said “this is what I want to do”. That year I learned how to use Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash, and was the catalyst to better myself over the summer.
The next year was my senior year in high school, I had spent the summer learning CSS (cascading style sheets) and had a fairly decent grasp on the subject (although I was still learning floats and didn’t know I had to clear them). This was the year I learned that Internet Explorer was going to be my greatest enemy. Chrome did not exist yet, and Firefox was still in the single digits in its version numbers. I ended up teaching the class CSS as my teacher didn’t know it and I knew everything else he was teaching that year, but it allowed me to practice and help others.
I attempted to do the whole college thing but it didn’t pan out for me the way I thought it was supposed to. My wife was going through college herself and we had our one child at the time, so my primary role was to be the provider, so between work and family, there was no time to settle down for school. Has it been a hinderance? Maybe, but it motivates me to better myself and focus on the next challenge.