The long road here!
Long post incoming, but I wanted to tell my story. I also wanted to make sure I put a face to the business and make it personable. Family and friends are important to me, and I wanted Model Output to echo that. You will see family posts, general stories and updates on my life here!
I teach my kids the importance of reflection and being grateful for the things we have in life. I start each morning asking them to tell me what they are grateful for, who they are today, and their goals. I decided to take a moment myself and write about this milestone of putting up the web site and officially starting business specifically for software.
Where do I start… when I was a young lad, I always was interested in computers. My Mom, Aunt and Grandparents encouraged me at a young age making sure I always had a computer to tinker around with. While mostly for gaming, I was also interested in what my brother was doing. He was always coding on a Unix box setting some kind of server up. I watched lines of code flash down the screen (like I was in the Matrix) and learned what I could. He helped me set up a Unix mail server and I learned how to transfer files from his box to mine while he was at college. It was all very exciting to me.
Years later when I went to college, I decided to major in Management Information Systems. The degree takes you down into a path of learning how to code, but also how to properly manage an entire system for business (SAP was what we learned). I always felt this fit me because I enjoyed learning business and also being a bit nerdy coding. I wasn't just stuck into one silo. I liked being creative and making things in this digital space was very fun. I like to tell people that I am a rare breed of understanding requirements for business and also talking the lingo for developers. Mix that in with my very extroverted nature, and you now have a consultant.
That led me to working for a technology company in Boston, called Prism, that made MIS software for the printing industry. I was their main report writer and database expert... ya gotta start somewhere! And thank goodness I did start here, because this was the single most valuable technical skill I have learned. Understanding data and providing information to owners/managers to drive change is key. Every department had reports to write and as I helped them, they taught me! They ended up getting acquired by a larger company named EFI, now ePS, which I knew nothing about at the time, except that our GM, Leland Morgan, was always saying that he was neck and neck with them trying to close deals. I do miss my time there and especially playing hip hop music with Paul Haggarty as he and Brady Lee taught me what they could about systems.
Working for EFI ended up being an incredible journey. At the beginning I was struggling learning big corporate America and the new system, Pace, that they assigned me to. I was paired up with Nancy Vella and she helped me learn a TON. I told her before and I will keep saying it… she is a wonderful teacher that is incredibly knowledgeable and I am thankful that she helped me. I traveled a ton for EFI being their Solution Architect and everything just clicked for me. I enjoyed what I did, but I always saw myself coming back to code new projects. I ended up building modules within the product that they went on to sell. I also started dabbling with writing my own independent programs that interacted with the system. I took every chance I could to show Jerry DuVal, the Senior Director of Software Engineering, what I was doing. He was also very encouraging and taught me a lot. In hindsight I can say this was only a fraction of the battle. Anyone can write simple code and looking back I can say he was very encouraging knowing what he knew. The first thing he told me was not to use PHP for my project and look into other languages. I trusted him, so I promptly enrolled into courses for Java, C#, Python, and Web Application design. I wasn't formally educated in computer science, but neither was he. I took it as a new challenge.
I went down the road of spending years coding on my own. I wrote music applications, integrated into social media sites with chatbots, wrote shipping applications, e-commerce sites, even a web scraping tool to see who bought properties in the county I lived in after I unexpectedly got a personalized mailer from a pizza company from moving into a new house. It was all very fun but for my own learning experience. Most of my programs were locally run on my machine and I never truly deployed anything properly. Again, deployment is just as challenging as writing an application (if not more). Tony Blaylock always warned me about it and boy was he right.
I then spent time learning AWS and got certified in deployment. It was difficult, in fact it took me just as long (if not more) to learn this as it did to learn how to code. Let that sink in. I spent countless nights and weekends putting this all into action over the course of a year. But for the business and the basis of all my programs, I wanted a solid foundation. Configuring S3 buckets with PostgreSQL databases along with my Unix box and properly putting up an environment for my programs to run in was challenging. But I put in a lot of effort and it finally paid off. It helped having friends like Tony, John Morelli and Jeramie Wilson telling me to keep going. It isn’t perfect, but I am proud of what I put into place.
I am forever grateful for Kris Gunn taking a chance on hiring me for his business. I am now consulting for him in our industry and couldn’t be more excited. I understand what he went through and put the same care and effort for his business as I did into mine. Making this move gives me the opportunity to really pursue selling software and gives us both a huge advantage together. The industry needs professionals like us to guide them and set them up for success. In that, sometimes comes opportunities for creating software. I can't count the number of times I was asked if I could develop software while consulting. And now I can confidently say “Yes!”.
Also, wanted to give special shout outs to some people not mentioned above. Tara Colon, Brandon Iskey, Julie Cardenas, Jonathan Thorpe, David Bentley, Paul Evenson, Stephen Buss, Rod Smith, Kirk Blackmon, Ben Barra, and Chris O’Leary. All these people I view as friends that helped me, pushed me, encouraged me or inspired me on this road. I also owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to my fiance, Kendall, who helped me and believed in me each step on this journey.
It feels like I just ran a marathon over the course of a few years. The business required legal documents, bank accounts, registrations, systems to manage everyday business, partnership agreements etc... Now that I crossed the finish line, I feel like l am prepping for the next race of actually doing work. But I now finally have a platform for my voice, teaching, helping others, building projects, and selling my software. This site enables me to compete in the tech space and I am incredibly excited for that!
