For the last 17 years I've been designing, building and supporting custom websites, web applications and analytics systems.
Officially, I'd consider myself a web developer with a very strong skillset in analytics and data engineering.
My Story
Frontends, Backends & WordPress
Before I was a full-time consultant, I designed and built front-end UI’s with technologies like Angular and Vue. I also did a lot of backend development with Laravel as well. WordPress allowed me to leverage all the skills in one place: design, backend and frontend coding. I began applying the modern tech I was using in web apps to build custom WordPress sites that were significantly more reliable, stable, and secure. This approach to WordPress results in sites that can rival any other CMS powered website out there, and it’s my bread and butter.
Analytics, Leads & Conversions
Working as a WordPress consultant often leads to supporting many other aspects of a website. Things like advertising pixels, conversion rate measurements and analytics setups, CRM integrations and search optimization. I also found myself working with many different companies, gaining insight into the common problems and goals they all shared. This experience lead to a passion for analytics, measuring performance, and improving conversion rates. The ability to measure and analyze the effectiveness of changes made to a businesses website is an extremely powerful thing, and it was very eye-opening to have this experience with so many different businesses.
This passion for analytics lead to advertising optimization, basically allowing me to use the analytics insights for improving the spend performance of marketing dollars. I began working with businesses to configure conversion optimized ad campaigns on Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook and many other platforms. As time went on, I found myself doing this type of work more frequently, especially when the results lead to increased revenue.
Becoming a Data Engineer & BigQuery Consultant
While working with advertising, analytics and conversion optimization, I quickly released the power of tracking specific business events over generalized metrics. Event tracking was the way to do this, and I became an expert at implementing what’s now known as a CDP (customer data platform). A lot of this work involved Google Analytics and Segment, and by way of Segment I was introduced to BigQuery.
At this point, I had already worked extensively with SQL, and it was very familiar. I began tinkering with Google’s ML tools early on, and immediately saw the power. I began working with companies to build out data warehouses, connecting offline conversion events to digital analytics and ad platforms for optimization and reporting.
This path led to my role as a freelance data engineer, where I'm able to build and also measure/grow the products I directly support. It's a wonderful combination.
Here & Now
Fast-forward 6 years, and I find myself fortunate to be working with all of these skills daily. Many people wonder how a lowly WordPress developer could be a BigQuery data warehouse expert. I understand the mentality, but I came into the skills I have today by way of hard work, a constant thirst for knowledge, and true experience with great companies.
Friends & Colleagues
I take my work very seriously, and strive to meet demanding deadlines while producing excellent results. Most of all, I try to build strong relationships with the people I work with. I’m very grateful to have worked with, and made friends, at the following organizations over the years.
Location
I work from an office just outside of Boston, MA, and occasionally travel to work onsite with clients as well when a face-to-face is best. Much of the work I do is outside of this area though, and I've supported organizations in New York, San Francisco, London, Sydney, Chicago and many other places inside and outside of the US.
Credibility & Contributions
I stay pretty active on Reddit, GitHub, Google Cloud Community and StackOverflow. Beyond that I’ve shared articles around the web, and contributed to open-source projects too.
- Smashing Magazine published author
- CSS-Tricks contributing author
- The New Stack published author
- WebFX contributing author
- WordPress open-source contributor and public plugin developer
- StackOverflow expert as a top 2% problem solver
- Champlain College gave me the degree (plus the amazing wife!) that started it all