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Delta Defense is the service provider behind the U.S. Concealed Carry Association — training programs and certifications for concealed carry and self-defense nationwide, plus a membership program bundling training material, software, self-defense liability insurance, and legal counsel. I joined as a Software Engineer working on business-critical APIs across partner workflows and membership systems. The first stretch was on the Grid team, supporting individual customer memberships; I later moved to the B2B team, where we build the group and business membership side. Leading high-initiative projects and becoming an integral part of that team is what earned the promotion to Senior Software Engineer. I've spent the time since on team-level leadership, pursuing initiatives that align engineering practices across teams rather than one team at a time.

LPi started as a print-and-ship shop for church bulletins. The business model changed shape entirely when they started selling ad space inside them — enough ads made a bulletin cheaper to produce, and for some churches the ad revenue covered printing outright and then turned a small profit. Out of that grew WeConnect, a home-grown CMS churches used to build and manage their own websites, and ParishesOnline, a searchable nationwide directory of churches and their advertisers. I spent just over five years on the PHP team behind both, growing from a Junior Software Engineer shipping small fixes into a mid-level Software Engineer owning backend services end to end. That's where I got deep into REST APIs and MySQL schema design — the same backend foundation I still build on today. Part of what drew me to LPi was their growing interest in serverless infrastructure like Cloudflare and AWS, and that interest carried straight through into how I build things now.

ThermoSoft manufactures electric radiant floor heating and snow-melting systems. I was hired as a Junior Software Engineer to rebuild their manufacturing software in PHP, and on day one we pivoted to vanilla JavaScript instead. My mentor set up the core architecture so I could hit the ground running; about 90% of the build from there was mine. It came out as a full single-page application integrated with SAP Business One, running the production line end to end — bill of materials, serial numbers, barcode printing and scanning at each stage, electrical QA, custom reporting, and UPS shipping, from raw wire to shipped product. Winning over a skeptical warehouse team turned out to be as much work as the software itself, and that argument settled itself once raw material could finally be tracked by batch, support could resolve issues faster, and the warehouse floor got measurably quicker. The system is still in production today, years after I left.

Kirkwood Community College is a public college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I spent the first year at a small branch campus in my hometown so I could work full-time and take classes in the evenings, then moved to Cedar Rapids for the main campus. The coursework covered the fundamentals in Java, Visual Basic, and PHP, and for a while I earned a little extra cash tutoring other students in my own classes. Three years in, I left with an Associate's in Computer Information Systems plus Web Development and .NET certificates.

Second Life is a massively multiplayer online virtual world, and it's where I wrote my first real code. I taught myself LSL — Linden Scripting Language — by reverse-engineering open-source scripts, then built and sold dozens of products under the Lastat Productions brand for Linden Dollars, the in-game currency. Nearly all of it was infrastructure other business owners used to run their operations: contest boards, schedule boards, event boards, auction systems, and HUDs (heads-up displays). The store eventually carried a support group of over a thousand members, and I reinvested the income by hiring more experienced developers specifically so I could study how they built things. Somewhere in there I realized I could see myself doing this for a living, which is what sent me to college. The store stayed open for years afterward, running alongside the professional career.