About

I'm a frontend engineer and I live Nagoya, Japan but I'm originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. I first came to Japan in 2004 for study abroad and after returning to the US for one year to finish my degrees in International Relations and Asian Studies, I returned to Japan as an English teacher. After working in private and public schools for a decade, I became a self-taught programmer. I caught the programming bug while automating OmniFocus. After seeing what could be done with code, I learned Ruby and then Rails in hopes of turning my hobby into a career.

After struggling to find enjoyment with the backend, I realized how much I enjoyed the frontend. While learning a bit of Laravel, I discovered Vue.js and quickly fell in love. I left my job as a teacher and began working in frontend development. Recently interested in functional programming, I got into ReasonML and then ReasonReact. With my newfound passion for functional programming, I found that React made more sense to me than Vue did, beginning my love affair with React.

For a time, I was deeply passionate about Tailwind. I've written a number of Tailwind plugins and promoted the usage of atomic, functional, and utility-driven CSS whenever and wherever possible. Recently, I've lost my fervor for Tailwind and now use Vanilla Extract for its type-safety.

In 2023, I fell in love with Qwik because of its focus on SSR and reducing how much JavaScript gets downloaded and when. I continue to love functional programming but I've learn to be happy with using it pragmatically within the confines of TypeScript. To fulfill my desire to learn a more academic version of functional programming, I play around with Haskell and other ML-like languages from time to time.

All my open-source work is up on Github.

I'm married to a lovely woman whom I met by total chance at Oktoberfest in Nagoya one lovely day in 2014. She's gorgeous, smart, and most importantly, funny. We keep each other laughing on a daily basis and I'm lucky to have her. My first son, Marcus, was born in September 2021 and my second son, Lucas, was born in March 2024.

When I have time for myself, I study traditional Stoicism (mentoring at The College of Stoic Philosophers), train jiu-jitsu, play video games, cook, drink natural wine, craft beer, and good whisky.