As a developer, I have always maintained an intimate relationship with design & user experience. Fundamentally, I believe user experience is the single most important factor to consider in all that we do. In my early days, I was the designer and developer on a plethora of projects. Nowadays, I leverage that experience to collaborate effectively with the UI/UX specialists on my team.

Collaborating with large groups of developers, locally, remotely, and in just about every timezone has — over the years — impressed upon me the importance of developer experience. Building a design system & application framework over the last couple of years has reinforced that idea more than I could have ever imagined. There are few greater joys as an engineer than witnessing rapid, autonomous development that's been enabled by your comprehensive documentation, concise APIs, and carefully planned architecture.

Through years of experience working as a full stack engineer, I've grown to love the architectural side of this discipline. Carefully planned architecture is paramount to building any complex system. It sets the entire tone for the production and can provide solutions or foresight to some of the most critical concerns. How fast can we build this? Will it scale? What if we need to make changes or address unknowns? How long will this last? Being able to answer questions like this before a single line of code is written is why architectural design should never be overlooked.

Turning any project into a reality requires passionate leadership. That leadership can often come from many places and in many forms. Having run my own business, managed numerous projects, and served as dev lead for several organizations, I've had the opportunity to hone this skill. Whether it's in the form of managing people or products, defining timelines, running Agile ceremonies, providing architectural direction, or even just mentoring peers or juniors, leadership is always at the core of everything I do.