From Kansas to Florida: A Developer's Journey

Flat Land, Big Sky

I grew up in Kansas. And look, I know what you're picturing: flat fields stretching to the horizon, wheat, maybe a tornado or two. Fair enough, that is a lot of Kansas. But I grew up in the suburbs. Strip malls, chain restaurants, and a neighborhood where every house looked like it came from the same three blueprints. Not exactly the dramatic prairie origin story people expect. Still, it was home, and it shaped me more than I realized at the time.

I grew up in a pretty typical Midwestern household. Church on Sundays, high school sports, the kind of town where everybody knows your parents and your parents know everybody. I played baseball, watched the Jayhawks with something approaching religious devotion, and didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life.

Computers were around, sure. I had a desktop in my room by high school, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time on forums and messing around with MySpace layouts. But I didn't look at a computer and think "career." It was just something I did for fun.

The Accidental Developer

The web development thing happened almost by accident. I was in my late teens, messing around with HTML because I wanted to customize things online. Then someone showed me PHP, and suddenly I could make things do stuff. Not just look different, but actually work. Forms that sent emails. Pages that pulled data from a database. It felt like magic, and I was hooked.

I started out completely self-taught, not even sure if this was going to be a real career or just a hobby that occasionally paid. After high school, I tried the traditional route, a couple semesters at a community college. But it was table-based layouts and outdated practices, and I knew that wasn't how the modern web worked. I was learning more on my own than I was in class.

So I made the leap and enrolled at Full Sail University, where I earned my Bachelor of Science in Web Design and Development. That experience gave me the structure and foundation I'd been missing as a self-taught developer: proper patterns, real collaboration, and the confidence that this wasn't just a hobby anymore. It was my career.

For the first few years though, I was still writing the kind of PHP that would make current-me break out in hives. Spaghetti code, SQL queries concatenated with user input, include files nested six deep. No version control. No tests. No architecture to speak of.

But I was building things, and people were paying me to build things, and I was learning something new every single day. That momentum carried me through the rough patches.

Finding My Way Through Frameworks

I started writing PHP in 2008, and for the first few years it was all vanilla. No framework, no structure, just raw PHP files doing whatever I needed them to do. It worked, but as projects got bigger, the mess got harder to manage.

That's when I discovered CodeIgniter. It was my first real framework, and it was a revelation. Suddenly I had routing, a templating system, a database abstraction layer. I worked with CodeIgniter for a few years and it taught me the value of structure and convention. But as the PHP ecosystem evolved, I could feel it falling behind.

Then in 2014, I found Laravel, specifically version 4.2, and it was one of those moments where everything just clicked. Here was this framework that was opinionated in all the right ways, that made PHP feel modern, that actually cared about developer experience. Eloquent blew my mind. Blade templates made sense. Artisan commands felt like having a conversation with your framework.

I went all in. Started rebuilding everything in Laravel. Started reading the source code. Started following Taylor Otwell on Twitter and absorbing everything the community was putting out. Within a couple of years, Laravel wasn't just my framework of choice; it was the lens through which I understood web development.

That might sound dramatic, but I think a lot of Laravel developers know what I'm talking about. The framework has a way of teaching you good patterns almost by osmosis. You use Eloquent long enough and you start thinking in terms of relationships. You use service providers and you start understanding dependency injection. Laravel is quietly educational in a way that I think is underappreciated.

Building a Career

The next several years were a blur of projects, clients, and learning. I did freelance work. I did agency work. I built SaaS products that succeeded and SaaS products that absolutely did not. I learned about deployment, about server management, about the gap between "it works on my machine" and "it works in production."

A big part of my career has been modernization work: taking legacy PHP applications written in other frameworks and rewriting them in the latest version of Laravel. I've migrated codebases from CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Yii2, and CakePHP. Every one of those projects taught me something different about untangling technical debt, understanding someone else's architectural decisions (or lack thereof), and building something clean from the wreckage. It's not glamorous work, but it's made me a significantly better architect. When you've seen every way a codebase can go wrong, you develop strong opinions about how to get it right.

I've also been feeling the pull to create content. For years I've learned from other developers who put themselves out there (on blogs, YouTube, podcasts) and I want to do the same. I remember how confusing everything was when I was starting out, and I want to make it less confusing for the next person.

That's the driving force behind everything I'm building now. Coffee with The Laravel Architect is exactly what it sounds like: me drinking coffee and talking about Laravel. Embracing Cloudy Days is more personal, more philosophical. Less code and more life. And the YouTube channel will bring tutorials and live coding to the mix. None of it has launched yet, but it's all in the works and I couldn't be more excited about it.

The Move South

Cassie and I got married in July of 2014, and almost immediately started talking about what we wanted our future to look like. By February we'd booked a trip to Orlando to look at apartments. By March, we'd packed up and moved. No years of deliberation, no endless pros-and-cons lists. We just did it. Packed up our Kansas lives and landed in the theme park kingdom.

The reasons were a mix of practical and personal. Weather played a role. Kansas winters are no joke, and the ability to be active outdoors year-round mattered. And being closer to Walt Disney World certainly didn't hurt.

Then in 2017, our daughter Viola came along, and suddenly the move felt even more right. Viola is autistic and nonverbal, and being her dad has changed me in ways I'm still figuring out. It's reshaped my priorities, my patience, and honestly my entire perspective on what matters. Florida has resources and communities that we wanted access to for her, and she lights up in the parks in a way that makes every minute of the drive worth it.

I won't pretend the transition was seamless. Leaving the place you grew up is weird, even when you're excited about where you're going. I missed the people. I missed the familiarity. I even missed the flatness, if you can believe that. But Florida has become home in ways I didn't expect. The developer community down here is solid. The pace of life suits us. And honestly, I don't miss shoveling snow even a little bit.

Remote Work and Roots

One of the things that made the move possible is that software development is beautifully location-independent. My clients don't care where I am as long as the code ships on time. Future clients and collaborators won't care if I'm working from Kansas or Florida or the surface of the moon. Remote work isn't just a pandemic trend for me. It's been my reality for years, and it's the reason I could pick up and move my family a thousand miles without changing my career.

That said, I think there's something to be said for having roots. Kansas shaped me. The work ethic, the straightforwardness, the "just get it done" mentality. That's pure Midwest. I carry it with me. When I sit down to architect a Laravel application, I'm not trying to be clever. I'm trying to be clear. I'm trying to build something that works, that the next developer can understand, that solves the actual problem without unnecessary complexity.

Maybe that's a Kansas thing. Maybe it's just a me thing. Either way, it's served me well.

Looking Forward

I'm settled in Florida now. Viola is eight and growing up faster than I'm ready for. Cassie keeps everything running while I stare at code and talk into microphones. The Jayhawks are still my team even though I'm surrounded by SEC fans. I still play poker. I still take too many photos. I still think PHP is a perfectly fine language and I'll die on that hill.

This blog, the podcasts, the YouTube channel. They're all part of the same thing. I want to build stuff, learn stuff, and share what I know. The address changed, but the mission didn't.

Thanks for reading. Next week, I'll get into some actual lessons learned from fifteen years of doing this. Fair warning: I have opinions.