About Me

Welcome to my blog! I just wanted to take some time to tell you about myself. I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. It is the kind of town that shuts down for Friday night lights and spends late nights around bonfires in the woods. I moved onto Long Island to pursue my studies in computer science and software architecture. I went to Stony Brook University where I received a great education, made lifelong friendships, and met my wonderful wife. As of today, I am happily married to my beautiful wife, settled down in a home on Long Island, and spend time with a very happy puppy.

My Software Career

Firstly, I have been working at LBi Software since I was in college. We have grown from a small to medium-size company in the past several years. Our company primarily creates custom sports analytics software for professional sports organizations (MLB, NBA, NFL). In addition, we sell several innovative Human Resource (HR) products.

I started as a simple intern and quickly moved my way up the ranks. It was here I started to learn the dos and don'ts about software architecture. Eventually, I had earned the lead on a project and started learning about projects and team management. In time, I quickly found interesting niches such as learning about Test-Driven Development ( TDD ) and pushing developers to have a better understanding of how, when, and where to write tests. I even ran company-wide training sessions on JUnit and Mockito.

In addition, I have designed and implemented a number of enterprise-level applications and scalable APIs. I have made mistakes and learned from each one. Mentors have pointed me in the right direction and I have given sound advice to those seeking guidance. I like to think that I am a humble and motivated software engineer with a passion for technology.

My Interests

As of recently, I have found a new passion for DevOps . As a software engineer, I naturally have a reflex to try to automate tedious tasks. I have pushed for my company projects to take advantage of Docker to improve the longevity of applications and ease the onboarding of new projects. Gone are the days of spending half a day trying to get a project setup! I've become an expert at setting up Jenkins pipelines, automating every step of the build cycle, and creating one button deployments.

In addition, I have found a niche interest in cloud engineering. We use AWS at my company and I have had the opportunity to take advantage of some of their great services. I have spun up databases on RDS, quickly setup authentication with Cognito deployed apps to EC2, pushed images to ECR, scaled those images in ECS and ELB's, served static websites on S3 buckets, and setup distributions with CloudFront.

What do I do for fun?

In my spare time, I enjoy working out, walking my dog, wine tasting with my wife, spending time around the pool, hanging out around a fireplace, drinking an IPA, and just being outside in general. I'm hoping this blog makes me a better writer and allows me to share my stories and experiences with other like-minded individuals.

Look forward to hearing from you all!

-Phillip