About Me
How It Began
When I was nine years old, my brother got a Commodore 64 for Christmas and taught me how to program stick figures to appear on the screen. I remember how thrilled I was with that accomplishment.
Years later, a friend showed me how to set up a BBS (Bulletin Board System) using the MS-DOS software TriBBS. If you've never heard of a BBS, it's like the internet on a much smaller scale — instead of connecting to servers over high-speed internet, users would dial directly into a host computer over the phone line with a modem. I was an aspiring SysOp right up until the World Wide Web arrived and quietly poached all my users. (I've since forgiven it.)
The Start of a Career
In 2003, I started my own web design business. I named it "Dirt Cheap Web Designs" with the tagline "Quality For the Pocketbook Impaired." The first website I built had a table-based layout, an animated dancing dog, and music that played when the Home page loaded. I thought it was the coolest thing ever — and I've been addicted to my work ever since.
After six years of doing business "dirt cheap," I renamed the company Foxglove Website Designs and continued serving clients for many years. Along the way I spent several years as a PHP developer at USAgNet, serving the agricultural industry, before making the leap to Ruby on Rails at Fabricut here in Tulsa — and eventually making the difficult decision to let the business go in 2021.
Present Day
Today I build backend services and APIs in Ruby on Rails at CoverMyMeds, part of McKesson, helping people get the medicine they need to live healthier lives. During my career I've worked as a sole proprietor, a team member, a mentor, and a senior engineer — and the path from shared hosting to Azure, Kubernetes, and Docker has been a genuine pleasure to walk. At heart, I'm still that curious kid in front of her first computer, just with a far better toolkit.
Outside of work, home is Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where my husband Jim and I landed after 40+ years in Wisconsin (we traded snowblowers for tornado sirens, and most days that feels like a fair deal). I'm an avid gardener — Oklahoma gives you eight months of growing season, which my Wisconsin brain still hasn't fully processed — and our household is lovingly managed by our dogs and cats, who have strong opinions about everything and no interest in keeping them to themselves.