Arizona State Legislature

Jun 2011 – Feb 2014

I joined the Arizona State Legislature’s Legislative Council as a User Support Specialist, providing help desk support before moving into a Programmer role in June 2011 — my first professional software development position. Supporting the same applications I’d later build and maintain gave me an early, firsthand appreciation for the user experience, both as a user myself and as the person other users turned to when something didn’t work.

As a Programmer, I developed and maintained internal applications used by legislative staff, working primarily in C#/.NET and VB.NET against SQL Server databases. The role gave me hands-on experience across the full lifecycle of an application — from gathering requirements from non-technical stakeholders to building, testing, and supporting the tools they relied on daily — and set the foundation for the rest of my software engineering career.