I'm a husband, uncle, brother, son, dog dad, good neighbor, rocker, Austinite, web developer, and, most of all, I’m your buddy. One of my favorite things to do is have a good laugh. When schedules allow, I like to take trips with the best travel partner, my super cool wife, Janeese. She's my best buddy.
I love the holidays, mostly because of the lights. And unlike most, I rather enjoy the music; it makes me think of the holidays, which somewhat signals a self-fulfilling prophecy, however with more of a truthy expectation. Halloween is also very important 'holiday' to Janeese and me; we love creating and sporting hilarious and awesome costumes.
Aside from laughing, banging on my Apple Magic Keyboard, dressing up for Halloween, putting up Christmas lights, traveling, and spending time with my awesome wife, I enjoy exercising, watching silly movies & TV shows, listening to music, playing music, doing yardwork, cooking, cheering on Austin FC & the Astros, and socializing with my pals.
When I was in my early twenties, I often wondered what the acceptable age would be for people to start calling me Al. Well, I've stopped wondering. My rad wife, many family members, and close friends now frequently refer to me as Al. Hard to say when it all started, but I finally made it!
If you have any questions pertaining to what I have just explained regarding how I spend my free time, go ahead and reach out! If you have any other questions, fire away. In either case, we live in the future; I check my email and various inboxes, so you can expect a timely response. Thanks for reading!
I have been at L7 Informatics since December of 2021, and my experience has been amazing. Not only am I constantly exposed to many life science topics that I never expected to learn, I continue to further my JavaScript knowledge and have expended my technical skillset with Python, PostgreSQL, and many different libraries and frameworks, such as VueJs, AG-Grid, Plotly, Power-BI, and R. My days are spent building applets and reports which live inside L7's benchmark product, ESP, a unified scientific data and process management platform. My position is on the solutions consulting / pre-sales team, so my work must look attractive and work well as I meet short deadlines. I also make frequent contributions to standard and core content as I work closely with both the product and engineering teams. Implementation and customer support teams also contact me when my unique product knowledge is needed.
I was employed for about a year and a half (June 1, 2019 - November 2020) at Vybe Software. During my time on the team, I contributed to three main products: Leia: Website Builder v2, Leia for Real Estate, and Leia for Campaigns. Aside from my developer tasks, I was integral in testing and QA prior to releasing each product. I also spent some of time researching and writing blog posts, which can be found here; I designed and built those pages, too. I spent about three months learning WordPress and built plugins and themes that, ideally, would have been released so WordPress users could integrate tools from Leia into their projects. If you're interested in hearing about the fate of Vybe, contact me, and we can discuss.
Vybe released this version in December 2019, and I was tasked with designing section templates, which total over 250. Since its release, I've written multiple PHP endpoints for minor updates.
Never released, Leia for Real Estate, is a website builder for real estate agents! I wrote the JS, REST API for the search widget and results display. For real estate specificity, I designed new section templates and rewrote placeholder text. Real estate data is hard to come by, so we were never able to properly release this awesome product.
We began building this one for those running for political office. The main differences from this and Leia Regulár are the donate and volunteer sections. I only somewhat enjoyed having to research campaign websites from both parties in summer 2020. This product is also offline per the demise of Vybe.
A few years back, I was approached by a close, childhood friend to create a website for his fantasy football blog concept. I happily accepted and Nerdball Fantasy Football was born. I worked with the MySportsFeed API to deliver basic, custom, and advanced player statistics to our readers. It was a super cool project, however, the creators decided to redirect their focus in different directions, so, currently, the site is minimally updated.
I created the website using Wordpress, Elementor site builder, and the Hello theme. Some notable plugins include Advanced Custom Fields, Code Snippets, and table Press. We currently employ four talented authors, most of whom participate in our weekly podcast. Check it out!
I built the Armstrong App at the beginning of 2019 as I was nearing the completion of my studies at Austin Coding Academy. It is a tracker for a pull-up program I participated in the second half of 2018. It has tremendously helped my pull-up numbers, and I continue to use aspects of the program in my daily exercises. If you're interested in a fun challenge that will make you stronger, give it a go; there's a link to the program with a description in the app. I created the app in order to facilitate comparing current session data with past results. Honestly, it's quite stale as I haven't gotten around to adding authentication for multiple users, and I have yet to add any graphs or flair, and the styling is minimal, but feel free to take a moment to peruse the app and source code. It's just a fun example of how I started my engineering journey. Maybe someday I'll make it super cool.