My journey to a career at Vercel.

I am excited to say that I have joined Vercel as a Senior Engineer. I get to work in a tech space that wants to drive the web forward, bring new ideas, and make the web faster. better. I am so excited to join a company with a drive to bring the web to the next level as well as support the community. With that, I wanted to write down my journey on how I got here.

I always knew I'd be close to computers. My father and I built them growing up. I'd sit on the arm of a office chair so I could see the CRT monitor and use the mouse and keyboard. It wasn't until college that I knew I wanted to be in web development. Learning the basics of HTML and CSS, creating my first window.addEventListener, "deploying" my first (static) site to a server. I was hooked.

I was also extremely fortunate to have a mentor who taught me Ruby (and Rails 4), and eventually got me my first internship at a small agency in the Chicago suburbs, HS2 Solutions. Being the only intern and having maybe 100 employees, I got to work on a lot of low-hanging fruit of many projects. I jumped around, helping analytics, writing google scripts, and eventually helping with front-end tasks. From there, the next big thing came out, React Native. I took courses, read the documentation, made too many demo apps to test the different features... and learned... I do not like mobile development.

Over the next few years I dove deeper into the full stack of JavaScript (and eventually TypeScript). I started empty projects, configured countless webpack configurations, and started to mentor the new engineers that were diving into this new age of web frameworks.

I then took a year off to work for my dad, at a small permit printing company in the Illinois Suburbs. I spend a year starting a brand new single-page application to refresh their old and outdated JSF application. However, with COVID, the team was eventually let go and I had to figure out what was next.

Fortunately, I was able to return to HS2 Solutions (now known as Bounteous)! They accepted me back and I was back at work, elevating the client's teams, products and features as a Lead Developer. I lead client teams from 2 to 20, teaching and mentoring TypeScript, React, accessibility, and web fundamentals. This was probably the most rewarding time of my career getting to now the engineers and help them grow.

Leading up to 2023, I started to battle with career growth. Agencies are client-focused, Bounteous was growing rapidly, and support for the leading engineers started to waver. I started to run out of billable work, I was limited in resources to grow and was unable to get the mentorship I needed. In early 2024, I applied to the Golden Arches.

I joined McDonald's Global delivery organization as a Web Lead in February 2024. I was working on new web experiences, new projects in Next.js to eventually distribute globally, service 120+ countries and over 40,000+ stores. I worked with a small teams of engineers, amazing creative resources, product and architecture. I learned so much in such a short time about the scale of McDonald's and the complexity of their infrastructure. I am so grateful to have worked with my team and am proud of the culture I contributed to.

During this time, I got the chance to experience the Vercel team. I have enjoyed the product (Vercel) personally and professionaly, as well as made a career from my knowledge of Next.js and React. I was very surprised when they accepted my applictation and started the interview process. I was even more surprised when they offered me a position 😂

Now, I work for a company that makes a direct impact on the web. How cool is that? My goals are to be apart of that impact, to contribute to the web, the community, and to empower and enable developers early in their careers. I am so excited to be apart of the Vercel team and I can't wait to report back on what I ship... since... you know where I ship 😏

So, what did you learn from this? If you are a junior engineer, NETWORK! Take time to collaborate, practice communicating, contributing... all of it! If you are a senior engineer, consider giving back. There are so many great ways today that you can help, mentor and teach the next generation of developers.