To formally introduce myself, I am Brian Wardwell and am a native of Fargo, North Dakota. Recently, I relocated to the Minneapolis, Minnesota area and am loving it so far. My journey to Web Development officially dates back to early 2004 when I began to work on a clumsy website builder, which were still new at the time, on Tripod.com. The motivation for a website came to promote my original music, Battle Cry, that I was distributing myself. The site used templates and the web builder tools provided by Tripod, however, I pushed it further by using Flash banner tools from another service to create ads and animation. I also began working on Adobe Photoshop the same year to create logos and other artwork.

Years later, in 2011, I made the decision that this is truly what I want to do in life and finally started to learn some code. I also enrolled in the Web Development AAS program at Minnesota State Community & Technical College. At the time, the program included more advanced Adobe Photoshop, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Web Development Strategies & Practices and moved into PHP/MySQL, Content Management Systems (CMS), eCommerce, JavaScript libraries and API's, User Interface & User Experience Design, and Search Engine Optimization. Although not required, I also took Python and Microcomputer Database courses to learn further programming techniques.

After graduating with my AAS in Web Development in May of 2015, I took online courses at both Minnesota State College: Southeast Technical and North Hennepin Community College to learn more Object Oriented Programming and .NET languages. My studies included work with C# (creating small Windows Forms Applications), C++ console applications development and Java console applications/applets development as well as additional SQL Database Design & Implementation.

My professional career began in 2016 when I was contracted by Dakota Supply Group (DSG) to merge their two intranet websites into one company-wide Wordpress intranet site. Following DSG, I joined Insight Technologies which gifted me an abundance of opportunities to new tools such as Laravel PHP Framework and further development in MVC design pattern, setting up and managing Vagrant development environments, development in Umbraco's C# CMS, and other tools such as using cURL PHP (client URL) to run verification checks on hosted SSL certificates. In addition, I was also introduced to working with Sitefinity and osCommerce content management systems.

In May 2018, I transitioned my employment to New Vision Solutions as a Software Engineer I. New Vision's introduced the fascinating world of the Internet of Things (IoT), much of what I have worked on to this point has been PTC's IoT development platform: ThingWorx Studio. ThingWorx very often interacts with PTC Product LifeCycle Management (PLM) products such as Navigate and Windchill (for interaction with BoM Management (Bill of Materials) and more). ThingWorx customization entails JavaScript based services, Java entities and objects, XML exporting/importing, etc. Other New Vision past and present IoT projects include .NET applications in C#.

In July 2019, I joined Codelation as a Software Engineer. It was challenging and exciting to get into the world of Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It was also my first experience developing with a MacBook and using other technologies including Heroku, Postgres, Jira, and some React JS. The development team was collaborative and fun to work with.