What’s the story behind the name?
Years ago I went on a sabbatical to take time away from work, reflect on my career, and reinvest in personal relationships. During that time I ran a lean experiment. I wanted to see if the Digital Nomad lifestyle was for me.
If you’re not familiar, a Digital Nomad takes full advantage of remote work and travels around the world on tourist visas. On my adventure, I went to Medellín, Colombia. The city of Eternal Spring is in a valley surrounded by great parks and hiking spots. It was a wonderful experience and provided the opportunity to study Spanish.
After the trip, I decided that being a Digital Nomad wasn’t for me. The core element that was missing was being part of a community. Though I enjoy traveling and sharing my love of programming with others, this inspired me to name my company The Vagabond Programmer.
To this day, one of my ambitions is to travel to conferences and set up a station in which other attendees can pair with me. This would be great for contributing to open-source projects, mentoring others, and leveling up my skills as well.
Tech Leadership
The past eight years I’ve been working as a Tech Lead / Staff Software Engineer.
At Pivotal Labs DC, I helped teams implement Extreme Programming (XP) principles to deliver software effectively. We worked with numerous Federal clients including F.E.M.A, N.G.A, and U.S.C.I.S. (Citizenship and Immigration services). My notable achievements include guiding U.S.C.I.S. in replacing a mainframe system for their Asylum Seeker program. This saved them over $10 million annually by removing licensing fees. Also led a team to help N.G.A. launch a new application that reduced the time to process aeronautical data (NFDDs) by 77%.
With Melostat, an independent consultancy made of former Pivotal Employees (ie. Pivots), we worked across the Insurance and HealthCare industries. For MetroMile (acquired by Lemonade), we launched a new product offering, Bundling with Homeowners insurance, within 13 weeks. Then with Credo Health, we built 2 products over the course of 3 product pivots: Patient Record Retrieval and Diagnostic-Code Analyzer.
For Home Depot I led an initiative to rescue a project for their new Returns system. It was in limbo for several years and went through four teams. I helped them to expand it from four stores to over 2000 stores across North America. I also authored a feature set called “Back to Shelf”, eliminating the need to return items to a nearby warehouse. This is estimated to save them 10s of millions of dollars this year alone.
My Career path
I have been programming professionally for over 15 years. Mentoring and teaching other engineers, typically while pair programming, is what motivates me.
Previously I worked at Pivotal Labs DC as a Staff Software Engineer. We helped Fortune 500 companies & Federal Agencies learn how to build software using modern methodologies and tools. In this role I had the honor of leading several projects; each team was able to build a product that delivered business value and delighted users.
Before that I worked with LivingSocial and saw it grow from an engineering team of ~30 to over 100. From a single monolithic codebase to a Service Oriented Architecture (and yeah, there were couple micro-services in there).
The most fulfilling part of my career has been mentoring others. The ambition for this website and Youtube channel is to be a resource for growing Software Engineers.
