What started as a project to make a simple & re-usable template for React projects turned into a paid research tool for digital nomads and expatriates to understand where in the world they could settle down in. Inspired by my mother expressing an interest in retiring abroad, it came to encompass every sanction-free destination in the world with immigration programs for seventy different countries that offer investment visas or naturalization through entrepreneurship or real-estate investment.

Armed with the unnoficial title of 'Mobile App Emperor', I built, launched and maintained the Flutter mobile application on iOS, Android and web. Our users were industrial, blue-collar railroad workers working in rough conditions. I traveled onsite to railroads in four different states to build custom functionality, responded directly to customer feedback, participated in sales calls as a technical advisor & served on-call more or less continuously. Also did work on React front-end & Python REST API endpoint logic when needed.

The pandemic was, after the dust settled on the initial lockdowns, the best time to travel. You could stay at a Hamptons Suites for $30 a night, it was absurd. At the same time, I was leading development of Paret0, an open-source project that of 30 contributors that was designing an socially competitive multiplayer habit tracker and software developer learning resource.

Unloop was (is?) a non-profit coding bootcamp for people who are incarcerated, or formerly incarcerated, and I was hired as the Lead Instructor for their in-person cohort at their Seattle headquarters. At the time, I was running a business selling some innovative (in my opinion) learning materials for learning programming, and the executive director recruited me to work there full-time & licensed my IP to white-label it for the students. Working with that population, while also contributing code to dev projects that the non-profit secured as part of its funding source, was a classic example of taking on more than I could chew. The pandemic blowing up in everyones faces, forcing us to adapt to a digital-only reality, was difficult to say the least, especially working with people who were incarcerated, in work-release, attending rehab or otherwise not the standard California techie. It was a very valuable experience.

I was hired for a three month consulting gig to build a full-stack MVP for a new YC startup called Revercare, focusing on connecting the caregivers of the elderly to trusted service providers. I love my grandma, so I really enjoyed building this out with React & Node microservices hosted on Lambda - I even moved down to Palo Alto for two of the three months, to get the experience of working in a hacker house, shared with two other startups in the same cohort. Needless to say, I enjoyed my time greatly, but was relieved to move back to Seattle for an office with stable air conditioning after the MVP launched.

Make no mistake about it, I was a digital nomad before it was cool. Yeah, sure, the pandemic took it mainstream, but the real sickos were attending Go(pher) Meetups in Sofia, Bulgaria in September of 2017. Like most self-taught software engineers, I started with the small stuff. I made a website for my mom, consulted for a friend's Amazon FBA business, and worked my way up to more interesting and technically demanding projects. I built a prototype of a freelancer marketplace in Uganda for a client on Upwork, worked on Know-Your-Customer (KYC) software for a startup in Trinidad & Tobago, and a few other things besides that put some money in my pocket.

After my misadventures in politics, I realized I had to make money. Onvia seemed like a great fit - I had a degree in Political Science, and they were a tech company selling access to a comprehensive database of government contracting data. Working within a sort of skunkworks, I worked on a new team of three on a new product and was blessed with autonomy, varied duties, direct communication with customers, a supportive and helpful manager and the opportunity to learn from every part of the company. I was effectively a junior product manager that also owned customer support for 500 customers, gathered requirements from them & contributed to product marketing. Among other things, I started and hosted the company podcast, before moving on to the next step in my career. I grew frustrated with the glacial pace of software development, and my customers unceasing torrent of complaints about the same bugs over and over again, and I decided to learn how to write some code myself to better contribute across an organization.

Ah, the humble intern. I was a fresh graduate, armed with the highly profitable and respected BA in Political Science, and thought it made some sense to get a job in my chosen field. I walked into California's 17th district, then run by Mike Honda, what was a complete tirefire that was mercifully put out the following election cycle by Ro Khanna. In the 6 short months that I was there, the honorable Congressman fell asleep in front of a CSPAN camera during a hearing on the war in Afghanistan & was formally brought under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for his District Office staff breaking rules regarding acceptable political activity involving his campaign. All the while, constituents called into the office to complain about the VA losing their files, USCIS statuses remaining unchanged over the years, or simply calling to talk to someone because they were just lonely. I saw a vision of what the future could be, and decided to move in another direction. I was time to get a real job.