Welcome Ted!
Much taller in real life
May 31, 2022
Hi, I'm Ted.
I currently reside in St. Louis, MO with my wife Lydia and our 3 lovely children (at the time of writing they are ages: 4, 2, and 6 months). I absolutely love the outdoors and am fortunate to live in such a bio-diverse state. I really enjoy farm-to-table and tail-to-nose cooking, gardening, tinkering, reading anything from John Eldredge, and not sitting still. I hold a leadership position at my local church and get the privilege to speak at several Bible camps during the summer.
I took a less-than-traditional path to software engineering, having spent the first 7 years of my career in the healthcare industry. In late 2021, after some talks with Will Carey, a close friend who works at BNB, my wife and I decided it was time to make the transition into software engineering. I went through a 3 month engineering 'bootcamp' and then went through the intern program here at BNB. None of this was easy, nor would it seem 'normal' to quit a career with a growing family...but I have a pretty low tolerance for being 'normal'/doing things the easy way.
For the capstone project of my bootcamp, I decided to take on a Rails project. This was fun because we had not learned anything about Rails yet, so most of the work was self guided. The idea behind the project was to create a way for people to track their spending habits/learn how to budget their money. In about two weeks time I had a very basic CRUD app that I thought was awesome.
When I began the BNB internship, we decided to make my little CRUD app actually awesome. I spent several weeks working on the app and adding all sorts of Ruby gems. Below are some screenshots from the app, as well as a summary of some of the gems including therein.
Here are some bits and pieces from my personal project:
Let's talk Gems
This project uses some really cool Ruby gems. I am using Devise (for user auth), Trestle (for admin pages), Chartkick.js (for the charts/displays), stimulus.js (for handling API fetch calls and for working the magic on the tool forms), RSpec (for testing), will-paginate (for pagination), faker (for database seeding), and image_processing and mini-magick (for photo uploads...the user's can upload a profile photo).
Looking forward:
I learned an awful lot from this project/internship and it has been really rewarding to take the knowledge gained from this experience and apply it to professional projects. One of the things I am really excited about is the opportunity to keep learning and growing my skills as developer. I really enjoy writing the code to put the product that the client desires on the client's computer screen. I am REALLY excited to be part of the team here at Brand New Box!
