Southern Virginia University

Context

I joined the university's small development team as an engineer and left as its technical lead. It's the role where I first learned that the job of a lead is to make the people around you faster, not to be the fastest person in the room.

Growing into lead

• Mentored junior developers and owned code quality across the team's work.
• Became the person other staff brought problems to, which is how technical leadership usually starts: not with a title, with a queue.
• Coordinated product launches end to end, from build through release.

The work

• Led the migration of the university's primary site from WordPress to Vue, and built its replacement CMS from scratch instead of adopting an off-the-shelf platform. Maintained the WordPress and PHP back end through the transition so nothing broke for the people publishing on it.
• Worked with the marketing department to design an internal dashboard that cut content-publishing turnaround from several days to under a day.
• Proposed and executed a cloud migration of departmental websites that cut roughly $12K a year in recurring infrastructure spend.

Why it still matters

Universities run on lean teams, legacy systems, and stakeholders who are not engineers. Learning to ship improvements without disrupting the people who depend on the old system is the same skill I used later on a regulated healthcare platform.

I'm also finishing my B.S. in Computer Science here, online, expected May 2027.