About Me

Overview

My name is Jim, and I am a software engineer in central Iowa specializing in fullstack development.

In my spare time, I run a small sheep farm with my family. In addition to raising lambs, we have an orchard of vintage and antique apples.

My professional experience and passion lie in building exceptional products and collaborating with people. I understand this isn't the most exciting About Me section you've ever read, but I just needed to put some boilerplate here in case anyone clicks off the main blog page.

I've recently decided to start writing about interesting situations I encounter while working on either personal or professional projects. The goal is to — at a minimum — create a blogpost every time a senior engineer writes more than a paragraph answer to a question in Slack. I figure it'll at least keep me honest through the remainder of this quarantine!

Feel free to reach out; I love meeting people, and hope you enjoy my site.

Quick Hits

I believe:

• Agile is great but scrum is a scam
• Standup should be shorter
• Story points are futile
• Good code is only DRY sometimes
• Succinct syntax is generally overrated
• Consistency matters more than people think
• Unit tests are good — integration tests are better