Thanks for taking the time to get to know me!
My name is Jesse Whitehead and I live in Topeka, KS with my wonderful wife and two kids. I love to invent, design, and build things both physically and digitally. I became interested in coding over 25 years ago at the age of 12 and the following year our school got the internet. Now while most of my classmates were content with simply surfing the web, I knew I had to figure out how it all worked. I developed websites throughout high school and received a technical degree in computer repair and networking. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it as much and without any local options to pursue web development, I went out and got a basic job to pay the bills. That job turned into an 18-year career in the optical industry that I enjoyed very much. Throughout my career I honed my skills in production flow, customer experience, and educating both employees and customers in a friendly non-technical approach. One of my biggest achievements was developing a lab management database that took us from the old days of orders filed away in a filing cabinet to the digital age where anything you wanted to know about any order was just a click away. This allowed us to expand from two locations to 8 locations with a centralized lab to manufacture all the orders. When it was required to upgrade our electronic health record system I learned SQL to be able to create a lab management interface in one of the most well know EHR systems. This saved our employees a lot of time while still being able to store and track orders effectively. It was in learning those new skills and creating solutions that I realized how much I missed coding and developing so I decided to relaunch myself as a web developer.