Hi, I’m Cody!
I’ve spent my career training people to use the tools I use, and programming for whatever task presented itself at the time. Finding that I became a stronger developer when I took the time to explain how things worked, I always tried to keep my focus simultaneously on teaching and developing. I’m seeking a role that will allow me to continue this.
Having spent the better part of my career programming in ActionScript, you might be thinking:
“why would I hire this guy?!?! Flash is evil, and it’s dead, good riddance!”
Flash, and in turn programming with ActionScript gave us freedom in a very constrictive internet at the time. I continuously strove to make the best most optimized product for whatever the task at hand was. When many of my peers would write spaghetti code, I pushed to learn to write classes and use Object Oriented Programming principles reading any book, article, or tweet I could find. I would strongly type my variables, extend classes, and embrace new ways to optimize my work.
In my last position with the Ad Server Flashtalking, I witnessed the sunset of Flash and transitioned to JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I had used these tools extensively over my career, but never as my primary tool. Working on the production team I spent 18 months converting hundreds of ads from Flash to HTML/CSS/JavaScript and creating new ones. I wanted to get back to doing training, so I moved over to the Studio support team where I lead new initiatives to create more comprehensive training, creating new documentation and examples, and recording videos clients could reference, encouraging my team to do the same.
My goal in any position is to continuously iterate and optimize my work practices, utilizing teaching opportunities to help me become a better developer.
What I’m looking for in my next position
Having spent most of my career splitting my time between programming full-time and teaching programming part-time, I’m looking to bring this all together in my next role.
I find that my sweet spot professionally is my ability to take complex ideas and break them down into simple, workable steps with understandable explanations along the way. Support happens not only with strong written material packed with great imagery but also through training and videos broken down into easy to digest chunks that quickly get to the point.
So often when working with tools or API’s, documentation is missing part of the story. Your project having a story as an integral part of your documentation is what brings it life.
Story not only builds your audience through ease of adoption but creates advocates who can relay your story building a broader client base. You may have an excellent product, but if it’s difficult to adapt your audience size won’t grow to it’s fullest potential.
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