You graduate from Saint Norbert College in 2004 with not one but two degrees: Computer Science and Philosophy. The philosophy degree seems impractical. (It is not — you'll need it later, during incident reviews.)
Your first job lands you in Green Bay, Wisconsin, writing .NET CRM systems for the dairy industry — Land O'Lakes, White Clover Dairy. The cheese puns write themselves.
From 2007–2010 you maintain the online classroom platform at the University of Phoenix — a system serving over 400,000 students. You learn what "scale" really means, and you learn it the hard way, at 2am, more than once.
You quit your job, buy a motorcycle, and ride it 20,000 miles solo from Arizona to Argentina. It takes eight months. You see things. You write a memoir about it: "Anxiety Across the Americas."
This is, by any measure, an unusual career gap to explain to recruiters. You explain it anyway. They are always impressed.
2016–2017: You join DAT Solutions and build "Load Board," an Android app, plus the Node.js APIs behind it — from the ground up. No legacy code to inherit. Just you, a blank repo, and a deadline.
2017–2019: At Cvent, you lead a React Native pilot project. Within six months you're promoted to Tech Lead — unusually fast, even by gamebook standards. Along the way you build a Storybook component library and start hosting local meetups.
2019–2024: At New Relic, you lead the migration of 50+ screens from Java/XML to Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, modernizing the mobile observability platform. The CI pipeline gets noticeably calmer. People start asking you questions in Slack.
2024–present: You're at eBay, working on item discovery & offer management, sales analytics, and coupon systems. You've also started integrating GitHub Copilot, Cline, and Claude Code into your daily workflow — turns out the philosophy degree helps here too.
You are, by all accounts, still shipping.