This year, you celebrated your 11th anniversary at Brightspot. What first brought you here and how have you seen the company evolve in that time?
It was Brightspot’s founder, David Gang, that brought me here. I worked with him at WebMD when he first started Brightspot, or Perfect Sense, at the time. He reached out to me to come work for him and that’s how it started. I eventually ended up coming on board. I’ve seen Brightspot evolve from this small startup to it being a mature, grown-up company with a whole bunch of new faces and new people. It’s been really cool seeing that growth and evolution. That’s been my favorite part of being here.
Can you tell me more about your role as a front-end engineer? What is a typical day like for you?
I’m in the delivery space, so working on clients’ website front ends is basically what I do. I work with a bunch of different customers, so I split my time every day between a number of projects, whether it’s a new site or if we’re troubleshooting issues that come up on an existing site. I’ve never been much of a manager, so I’m an individual contributor and I still primarily write front-end code, but I also give guidance and review pull requests and such.
During your time at Brightspot, is there a particular project you’ve worked on, a feature you’ve built or a problem you’ve solved that you are most proud of?
That would be Brightspot Go for me. Since really kind of early on I’ve been involved in creating sort of a starting point for projects. Over the years that has evolved into what Brightspot Go has become — either as a way to create out-of-the-box smaller sites for clients or using it as a starting point for a more complicated custom-designed site. So, definitely Brightspot Go is probably the thing that I’m proud of the most here.
What first inspired you to become a software engineer?
I’ve always been into computers since I was a kid. I’ve also always really liked making things. Even though I started out in the hardware world, for me making software touched on both of those areas. So, it’s been fun and rewarding and it’s kind of always a thing I’ve been into.
What’s the best piece of career or life advice that you’ve ever received?
I go back to the advice David Gang gave me of always doing the right thing for the client or the customer. It’s really guided the way that I work, and I’ve made lots of happy people with that mantra along the way by just always striving to do the right thing.
Besides the people, what is your favorite part about working at Brightspot?
It is definitely going to have to be our customer and client base. I really like working for giant companies like Google and Amazon. It’s super fun to say I’m working on Google’s website. I think that’s my favorite part.
What are your favorite activities or hobbies to do outside of the office?
I’m definitely a stereotypical outdoorsy Colorado person. I like to do all the outdoor things! I would say mountain biking comes out on top, but there’s also rock climbing, skiing — whatever the season calls for — but I think mountain biking is my favorite.
In August, you volunteered for an organization that supports veterans called Warhorse Ranch with some of your fellow Colorado-based coworkers. What was that day like for you?
It was super fun and it was really rewarding. Listening to the whole story of the ranch and how the owner started it was moving. Also, what they do for people with mental-health challenges is really cool. We helped out on the farm a bit. We cleared out some stables, chicken coops and such, and did a little bit of fence work as well. It was really inspiring and it kind of inspired me to do some volunteering and mission stuff outside of the Brightspot volunteer days that we get to do. That was a really cool experience.
I also saw you recently spent your sabbatical in Iceland. What did you do while you were there? How was the experience overall?
That was such an amazing trip. I’ve always wanted to go there and I’ve never had the chance before. I think the wild part for me was the amount of ecosystems that are in one small island and being able to see all of that over a shorter trip was super cool. We did some backpacking through the Highlands area in the middle and then did a road trip around the whole island. We saw everything from beaches and oceans to mountains to hot springs to volcanoes. It was a very, very cool experience.
What is one thing you think people would be surprised to know about you?
I was trying to think of a good answer for this and I have no idea, but I came up with one I think might be kind of fun. I almost became a race-car driver. I was super into cars and race cars and it was my childhood dream. I didn’t want to be a firefighter or whatever, I wanted to be a race-car driver. In fact, I went pretty far down the road of actually trying to become one before I realized how much work and dedication that it actually takes. It’s so much easier to just have a sort of a normal job and be a software developer and then play with race cars and mountain bikes as a hobby instead of trying to do that as your career. So, that’s my fun fact.
