Hello, world!
I'm an iOS developer at Slickdeals. You can find more information about what I've done there on my LinkedIn. Please feel free to e-mail me with questions or thoughts.
I'm also a photography/videography enthusiast! I love video games, food, and have a black belt in Taekwondo. Thanks for visiting~
About Me: Always Be Learning
I became interested in programming in high school when I learned about game hacking. There were some really cool people making some useful tools for games I enjoyed. It was basically like watching characters from The Matrix manipulating reality. The idea that maybe someday I could make something that hundreds or thousands of users would want seriously motivated me. I learned C++, Win32 API, and reverse engineering, and then went on to make very popular tools for various games. Bending video game worlds, or seeing what was possible, was just way too addicting and fun. It was a super educational journey and put me in the right mindset to basically tackle all kinds of problems. Read More
I started working professionally at Slickdeals on May 2016. Initially, I interned there and, although I applied for a mobile position, I was handed a web development test. I learned how to get a local LAMP setup running just for this and passed. While successfully contributing to both the frontend and backend for a couple years, I kept working on iOS tickets whenever I could--none too small. Eventually, I was hired as a full-time iOS engineer in February 2018. I've been at Slickdeals since then and have learned so much working in a cross-functional capacity with agile managers, product managers, designers, backend engineers, adops, etc.
Slickdeals has provided me with the stability and time I need in order to grow as an engineer. Not only have I grown a lot as an iOS developer in all areas to get an app running and monitored from scratch, but also as an engineer and team member in general. The WWDC videos and articles Apple provides are super helpful and provide a lot of important information about the latest features to enhance an iOS app and also to help us in our development process. I became interested in architecture and what exactly makes "clean code," however, and Apple intentionally remains pretty neutral in that regard. Thus, I needed to look outward.
As Robert Martin, the author of Clean Code, quoted Martin Fowler, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." Thankfully, there are a lot of great resources to learn more about what makes good and bad engineering. It is my belief that the sole reliance on hands-on experience and encounters in the workspace are insufficient to truly understand good design. If I want to be certain that I attain the knowledge I need to be a clean coder, then I need to be that student that isn't afraid to ask questions--but on steroids. Always Be Learning.