In early 2022, our WordPress developer left. That vacancy turned into a turning point for me. Within a year I was offered another promotion and asked to decide what direction I wanted to grow in. Even before that, I had been looking beyond day to day development and asking bigger questions. I was thinking about how digital solutions could solve division level problems, how to design systems that would hold up years down the road, and how the work we did now would shape what came next.
In 2019, our backend development team moved from being part of a communications group to being fully within the University Advancement tech team. That change brought a lot with it. One of our developers left. We had to shuffle workloads quickly. Then COVID hit, which added its own complications. Hours were reduced for a while, priorities shifted, and we focused on keeping essential systems running while slowly tackling technical debt.
In 2017, after five years at Wake Forest, I was promoted to Associate Director, Digital Development. That was the first time I stepped into a formal leadership role. I also continued doing development work. One of my first big tasks was helping hire a Senior Web Developer. My boss gave me full authority to review resumes, plan and lead interviews, and make the final decision.
When I started at Wake in August 2012, our setup was fragile. There were no development servers, no version control, and no formal process. Everything had to be edited live in production. It felt like walking a tightrope. Any mistake could break the site. Collaboration was a nightmare because two of us could easily overwrite each other’s work. It became obvious very fast that we needed a stronger foundation.
I grew up during the early days of personal computers. Our first PC was a Commodore 64 and only had DOS. Back then everything was done via the command line including playing games which were text based. Because my father had been working in the IT field since before I was born, computers were always part of my life. I can remember him bringing home punch cards and telling us that they spelled out our name.