My life has been anything but average. I was born in a mining town in Canada, and I lived my first seven years on a First Nations reservation. Topping it all off, I was tall for my age, uncoordinated, and introverted. My early experiences have given me an acute awareness of how different each of us is, even when we look the same on the surface. I thrive on confronting ambiguous situations and bringing order to them by establishing systems, best practices, and creating software. While I especially enjoy greenfield software projects, writing software of any kind is a fun challenge. I started my career as a graphic designer. Now, I work as a software engineer and systems architect. I have experience using AWS and Azure clouds, and writing software with JavaScript on Node, React, Angular, and Vue. I can contribute to architecture, code, design, and data. Lately, I have been enjoying GraphQL API development. The power and flexibility to query just the data I need and not develop a specific endpoint to limit unnecessary data fields is one huge benefit. Since I have been at this work for 18 years, I bring a diverse set of experiences and opinions to the process, but I am always open to the perspective of others. I thrive when I am challenged and learning new ideas, and discovering better ways to create value. For seven years in the early 2000s, I worked as a freelance graphic and web designer serving small businesses. During that time, I became fascinated with marketing. Recently, I started a small digital marketing agency called FlareMark to help small to medium businesses with web design, development, and digital marketing services.