sbtl

I spent 12 years in technical production and operations leadership before writing my first line of code. When COVID hit in 2020, I led our company's pivot to virtual events - managing the technical side of productions for sitting presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs, and thousands of attendees where everything had to work the first time.

While customizing virtual event platforms with JavaScript and CSS, something clicked. The problem-solving, the systems thinking, the need for things to just work - it was the same skillset I'd been using, just applied differently. I started The Odin Project that year and haven't really stopped coding since.

What I appreciate about development is the same thing I valued in production: building systems that work reliably under pressure. No debugging in front of 2,000 attendees. No "we'll fix it in post." Just solid architecture and attention to the details that actually matter.

The transition from operations leadership to full-stack development isn't typical, but the fundamentals transfer: understand the system, anticipate failure points, build for reliability, and sweat the details that users will never see but will absolutely feel if you get them wrong.