I love to build things. From wedding dresses to websites, I’ve created a lot of things I’m proud of over the years. To me, design and engineering are about solutions to problems; whether the constraints are aesthetic, monetary, browser-based or temporal, good designers and engineers provide solutions to real-world problems. My perspective has broadened over time, based on a number of different career paths. Management, education, product development, print design, fashion design, web development and enterprise application architecture are all facets of my experience.
Computer programming has been an interest of mine since the early 1980’s. I was lucky enough to have learned LOGO on an Apple 2c at a Montessori school. In junior high I could often be found downloading programs from BBS to a cassette tape drive attached to my Commodore 64. My love for technology continued until I ended up in Chicago at a conservatory program for costume design. My Chicago years were creatively inspiring, and financially barren. After I was thrown out of school because my financial aid application was denied midway through my sophomore year, I returned to Dallas, intent on getting a college degree, and graduated from the University of North Texas in 2001 with a B.F.A. in Fashion Design.
Early in 2005 I purchased a 17″ PowerBook, and became an OS X convert immediately. Over the course of the next several years I reacquainted myself with technology. Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign became tools that added value for my employers. During that time I worked as a senior manager at a popular boutique restaurant chain in Dallas, and in 2005 forayed into web development. For the next ten years I pushed the boundaries of my job descriptions to include technology whenever possible.
In 2009 I started teaching part time at the college level. 2010 saw my first client website and introduced me to javascript. From then on my interest in web development gradually progressed from a hobby, to a passion. In addition to my other jobs and the development of my teaching career, I regularly studied the state of the web and developing technologies. In 2012 I joined Code School, and as far as I know, I’m the only student to complete all of their courses. In 2014 I developed a site in WordPress and it was my platform of choice for client work over the next three years.
In 2017 I joined Children’s Health System of Texas as a consulting front end developer. After 4 months they created a full time front end developer role for me. Over the next 5 years I updated all of the templates necessary for a full site redesign and delivered HTML, CSS3 and JS code for all their web properties – 6000+ pages worth. Improvements to analytics via a full rebuild of GTM, Brightcove video support, WCAG 2.0 improvements, migration of front end experiences from Google Search Appliance to Apache Solr / Fusion, and a custom integration of the OneLink platform for Spanish translations are some of the web projects I personally delivered. In 2018 I began a custom Angular app for data management, and served as designer and front end lead on that project taking it from Angular 6 to Angular 10. 2020 brought a management opportunity, and as Manager of Technology and Development for the Marketing Department, I helped to shape the direction of the department’s marketing technology and integration with EPIC and mobile apps for patient use.
Joining Steward Health Care in 2021 as an engineer on the cloud team, I initially worked on front end maintenance and migration of legacy AngularJS applications and new features in their modern Angular 12 application suite. This position also comprised responsibilities in C# .NET APIs, SQL, SSMS, and Azure at enterprise scale. After a senior director left the company in 2022 I inherited an application that comprised Python, SQL, MongoDB, Express and jQuery. As the sole developer on the project, optimizing ETL and moving the application to a hybrid Azure / on-prem solution, as well as repository management and deployment pipeline creation were all in scope. As an engineer with the cloud team, I added value to other teams by adding Microsoft Entra ID authentication via MSAL to on-prem .NET apps. I contributed improvements to a custom application used by CFOs of the various hospitals that comprised Windows desktop notifications and forms, a C# .NET Core data layer, and an Angular 15 PWA for administration. I served as the front end architect for an inter-hospital inventory transfer application written in Angular 17 that included request processing, tracking, and in-app user management. In 2024 I inherited a POC built over a year’s time by a 3rd party team for sending patient communications. Over 5 months I operationalized the POC, including standing up the resources and environments for QA and production, which was the most challenging project I had worked on to date. The project was a server-less collection of Azure Function apps written in Python. I was charged with implementing data integration from Meditech, and developed both API and Azure Data Factory approaches, ultimately settling on the latter. 5 function apps (including a durable function orchestrator) and more than 30 resources per environment were all managed by Terraform with the AzureRM provider. Postgres SQL database entities were managed with SQL Alchemy and migrations with Alembic. The function apps shared a custom PyPI library deployed as an Azure Artifact. Leveraging Azure Service Bus Queues and Azure Communication Services facilitated custom requirements around SMS and Voice messaging outreach. Build, deploy, resource updates, database updates, and IAC were all managed by Azure Pipelines with continuous integration and Git pre-commit-hooks. I tend to learn the fastest when I have a concrete goal and reasonable starting place. For this project I had both, and was able to learn and teach my co-workers while simultaneously delivering value.