About Me

What I Do

While earning a degree in Graphic Communications from Minnesota State University Moorhead, I discovered I didn’t have to choose between design or development.

Designing and coding for over 12 years has allowed me to acquire a wide breadth of skills that help me bring ideas to life quickly and to think of creative solutions to complex problems.

How I Work

Many designers get stuck in the trap of creating design artifacts that get them no closer to a solution. When I create mockups, I refer to them as "conversation pieces." They’re meant to be iterated on and adjusted to meet deadlines.

I do my best to never waste time.

I loosely follow a Lean UX model, by creating a prototype (clickable or coded) and regularly test it to ensure no time is wasted going too far down the wrong path.

Through research-led UI/UX design decisions, I’m able to design clean, accessible, intuitive, and professionally polished user interfaces

Read more about my design process

I primarily develop in Javascript using React and frameworks like Gatsby (used to build this site). Since I’m also a designer, I naturally fell into specializing in CSS, which also makes me masochist 🙃. I also care about accessibilty and do my best to make sure my HTML is semantic with proper aria labels and I use colors with good contrast. Since I hate wasting time, creating well-organized, maintainable, and extensible code is also very important to me.

I’m comfortable in any agile workflow, contributing to teams that followed Scrum, Kanban, and XP. I’ve helped transform teams to become more agile, instituting retrospectives on multiple teams that didn’t already follow the practice to ensure continual improvement.

I’m an advocate for the local UX community, formerly serving as an event organizer and website designer/developer for IxDA Phoenix and I mentor colleagues and those looking to get into the industry.

Getting Personal

I grew up on a small, dairy farm in Minnesota. Farming was never really my thing, so when my dad bought a Windows 3.1 computer to help with his accounting, it opened up a whole world for me.

I'm currently living in Mesa, Arizona with my beautiful wife, Kimberly, and our handsome dog, Chauncey.

When I’m not learning more about design and development, I like to work out, hike, play/watch sports, cook, make cocktails, garden, and study languages.