Full-stack developer
Hi, I'm Don. Seven years of full-stack, a break, and now I'm deep in what agentic AI can actually do.
Most of that was consulting work — Perficient, Creed Interactive — plus a stretch in-house at Cogency Global. I came up self-taught and I still put time into the basics. I'm looking for a full-time or contract full-stack role.
If something here caught your eye, I'd love to hear from you.
Career
Where I've worked
I joined as a Development Team Lead, running a four-person team building two .NET/Angular compliance tools for our operations teams. I ended up owning the technical conversations with stakeholders and spent a lot of time in code review with teammates.
I picked up React on the job and became senior dev on the ConvergeOne account, breaking a custom chat app into microfrontends so features could ship independently. I worked on Delta Dental of Michigan in parallel, in a SAFe environment, and helped push through 2,600-plus QA tests under a tight deadline.
Mostly I worked on a Java/Spring trust and custody portal that moved about $2 billion a year, including migrating ACH bulk processing off legacy systems, which earned me an innovation award in 2019. I also guided 50+ Adobe customer teams through a licensing migration.
My first dev job. I learned the ropes and migrated an old AngularJS marketing site to Angular 4 on a tight deadline.
Projects
Stuff I'm building
NYT Connections Solver
I wrote a set of fixed strategies for NYT Connections and pitted them against LLMs from OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama and others, with a public leaderboard. Try it out.
TypeScriptNestJSReactBullMQVercel AI SDKBuild Notes: I started the Connections solver in OpenCode to explore the design and set up the architecture. Partway through, the project outgrew my setup there, so I moved to Claude Code and finished the build.
MTG Rules Assistant
A tool that answers questions about the Magic: The Gathering comprehensive rules using hybrid semantic + keyword search, citing the exact passages it drew from. Checked against a 50-question eval set.
PythonFastAPIRAGQdrantGeminiBuild Notes: Built with Claude Code and the Superpowers plugin. For the architecture and each feature, I had the agent grill me on the design before writing any code.
The rest of it
I think the personal stuff matters.
Here's mine.
Off the clock
I like to be doing something. Here's what that looks like.
🕺 Dancing
Dancing is how I stay active and social. I'm open to any style, but rhythm dances have my heart.
📚 Reading
Reading broadens my mental models and is my favorite way to relax. The full mix is on my Goodreads shelf.
Add me on Goodreads →🎮 Final Fantasy completionist
Side Quest: Unlocking every achievement across the Final Fantasy series on Steam. I'm 0% of the way there.
See the current tracker →⚔️ Warhammer 40k
I love tactile, hands-on hobbies, and painting Warhammer 40k miniatures is a favorite creative outlet of mine. Here's a look at some of the armies I've built and painted.
🐕 Saxxon
I share my space with Saxxon, my Sheltie and constant companion. He has his reactive moments, but he's my best buddy and keeps life lively.
