Trailhead

< id="sectionbody"> Until about two years ago, my only real exposure to programming was being forced to build an HTML website in an undergraduate engineering course. And just like that project, my appreciation for the craft of coding was perfunctory (at best). Then my friend introduced me to magic of macros in Excel.

Instantly I was hooked.

The logic. The power. The incredible simplicity on the user end. It all tapped into my deep rooted love of process optimization and operational efficiency (yeah, I'm one of those guys).

After running out of ways to incorporate macros into my daily Business Analysis work, I started building macro enabled workbooks for my co-workers to help them achieve more with less effort -- my love for VBA grew to a point where that same friend and I were facilitating a series of classes instructing on the basics of Excel.
Soon I was taking on "VBA mentees" from our nonprofit's educational programs who wanted to who wanted grow in their personal knowledge of VBA.

From there I started woriking in Apex alongside the organization's Database Architect. Once we discovered Apttus' X-Author, a service that allows end-users to update Salesforce directly from Excel, I was in a position to create tremendous value for my co-workers, the organization, and the people we serve by leveraging my knowledge of VBA and Apex.

Even though I was building more than I previously could have imagined, I was still limited by the simple fact that VBA and Apex are not high on the list of Preeminent Programming Languages.

As someone who values direct action and demonstrated results, it was difficult to justify the expense and inconvenience of suffering through a years-long traditional University-style education to meet my didactic needs. Fortunately for me, an incredible disruptive technology called CodeCademy allows students to actively learn programming at their own direction. Through CodeCademy and branching out on my own to construct this GitPage, I've logged hundreds of hours writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Soon I'll be expanding into AngularJS, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Rails Authentication, Python and more.





Outside of that my life is filled with dogs (particularly m'boogie StarFox Mulder), an absurd volume of podcasts, performing comedy with my friends, exploring the wonderful music of this world, and masochistically watching terrible movies and low-budget conspiracy theory "documentaries".