I've spent 15 years learning how to write code that my future self won't hate.

I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas, messing around with HTML on a desktop in my bedroom and spending way too much time customizing MySpace layouts. That turned into PHP, which turned into a career I never planned on having.

After a couple semesters at community college learning table-based layouts (seriously), I enrolled at Full Sail University and earned my Bachelor of Science in Web Design and Development. That gave me the structure I'd been missing as a self-taught developer.

I found Laravel in 2014, specifically version 4.2, and everything clicked. Here was a framework that was opinionated in all the right ways, that made PHP feel modern, that actually cared about developer experience. I've been building with it ever since.

A big part of my career has been modernization work: taking legacy codebases written in CodeIgniter, Yii2, CakePHP, and ExpressionEngine and rewriting them in Laravel. Every migration taught me something about untangling technical debt and building something clean from the wreckage.

In 2015, my wife Cassie and I packed up our Kansas lives and moved to Florida. In 2017, our daughter Viola came along, and being her dad has reshaped my priorities, my patience, and my entire perspective on what matters.

Now I'm building content alongside code. Coffee with The Laravel Architect is me talking about the framework I love. Embracing Cloudy Days is the personal side, covering mental health, parenting, and the messier parts of life. And The Laravel Architect YouTube channel is bringing tutorials and live coding to the mix.