Spencer Pope

Work

If you found your way here from somewhere else on the internet, check out the home page for a brief-ish overview.

Resume

For a terse one-page overview of my professional experience, you can download my resume here. I also built a React-based widget version of my resume that you can check out on my resume page.

What I've done

My resume is boring…

… So, I'm writing this post as an exercise to start changing that. One thousand interesting words about my professional career will hopefully follow.

First real job

It started in 2017. The owner of a local tech company asked me if I liked messing around with computers when we met at my university's job fair. I told him I did, and I started as a software tester for Instant Technologies in Portsmouth, New Hampshire a couple of weeks later. The company sold instant messaging software, so I would use the application and report anything that seemed off to the developers. They considered the input from the testers and decided which items were worthy bugs that should be fixed. It was the first time I saw software development in real-time and grasped the concept of priority as it pertains to a team of workers making something.

A brief step back

At the time, I was in my fourth semester at the Paul School of Business at UNH. Before college, I had no significant interest in technology. In my second semester there, I took a core class called Management Information Systems. I noticed that upperclassmen were constantly warning freshmen of this class's difficulty, and that most of my peers had already decided to dislike the class on day one. I faired well, and even enjoyed the occasional lesson, but the final project of building a personal website truly lit up my world. Later on, I became a Teaching Assistant for that class. At the Paul School, every student gets a BS in Business Administration, but they also choose an "option", which is a specific business discipline that dictates the electives they take after completing the core curriculum. I chose what could accurately be called the Tech Track, but was colloquially known as Information Systems and Business Analytics, or "ISBA". I picked up a minor in IT at the engineering college as well, and I also got involved with the Information Systems Management Association, eventually serving as both president and vice president of the tech-focused student org. This is all just to say that I was enamored with technology and set on making it part of my life.

First corporate job

The following summer, I had an internship with Sovos in Wilmington, Massachusetts. They sold tax compliance software. As a product management intern, I shadowed developers and stakeholders during their scrum ceremonies. The only thing they encouraged me to do was study the methodology they were running. I'd focus on one scrum team for 1-3 weeks and have one-on-ones with its members to ask for career advice and get their thoughts on the department. I'd also ask if I could help them with anything, and occasionally a developer would teach me how to build a form or a product owner would have me write some user stories. Learning how the business value of several different applications was delivered to clients using the same methodology across each team taught me how small groups of people can set goals with ambitious timelines and meet them by planning and executing.

First international experience

My senior year was starting, and the time to study abroad had passed. I didn't regret forgoing that opportunity. I had felt that my time on UNH's campus was too scarce to give one semester up. However, I felt a concerning cluelessness about the world outside of America. So, I decided to visit the most novel place I could think of, China. It was and remains an undeniable world superpower with a staggering population, the second most dominant world language, and a uniquely legendary culture. I got admitted to a four-week immersive language course at Beijing Language and Culture University, booked my travel plans, and flew there on Christmas Eve. Spending a month in China at that age gave me a fresh perspective on what the world has to offer and opened my mind to unconventional opportunities. That trip solidified travel as a core value and would influence many of my future goals and decisions.

Learning software development

After that, I finished college and started as an Applications Analyst at Definitive Healthcare in Framingham, MA. I took this role because it was the closest any company I interviewed with seemed willing to let a lowly business student get to their application code. I was glad to be surrounded by engineers. The company sold its clients access to a web app that allowed them to create reports from healthcare data Definitive was buying from the government. The app allowed users to query about twenty different databases that we referred to internally as products. A product might provide specific information regarding hospitals, physicians, or long-term care facilities. Some products were as specific as renal dialysis centers, and each of these had a corresponding database. Users were able to choose which product they wanted information from and fill out a form specifying filters to be applied to the database. The forms were built with ASP.NET on the front end, which is a scripting language that allowed us to build custom filtration forms for each product from a shared design template. On the back end, C# controllers would ingest the user's inputs and apply them as parameters to a SQL stored procedure that was executed against the database. The controller would then return the resulting dataset to the client which was displayed as an ASP.NET datatable. As an Applications Analyst, I built new products with this design pattern when the company acquired new data. I made adjustments to existing products by committing changes to both the SQL and .NET codebases. I solved bugs that came in from the product support team and made copious laps up and down the repositories while investigating them. I learned the tenets of source control and practiced the ABCs of being a software developer while supporting the product's evolution.

Becoming an engineer

My team took learning on the job seriously at Definitive, and we decided to learn the popular JavaScript framework React.js. Motivated to apply our new skills, we collaborated with engineers to develop a new build step in the application's deployment process that transpiled a TypeScript/React project and added it to the .NET app's minified JavaScript. This allowed us to render custom React widgets inside any known elements in the legacy application. We also developed a REST API using Node.js that could run stored procedures against the database and return results to the client in JSON format. Subsequently, we engineered a new workflow that allowed us to build custom client-side user interface features and integrate the company's data independent of the rigid framework we were previously confined to. The first feature my team produced with this pattern was an everpresent quick search field that users could enter a term into from anywhere in the application. We built a custom results page for quick searches that displayed relevant data grouped by product. This was the first search that allowed uncertain users to query all the products they had access to at a basic level. It also displayed a limited number of rows from databases the user did not have access to and encouraged them to contact their customer success rep to purchase full access to that product. The success of these features elevated my team to new roles as Applications Engineers and solidified the legitimacy of our new React-based development workflow. We drove all these changes to the organization in two years while simultaneously adopting git for source control, automating manual deployments with Azure DevOps, and migrating from dedicated servers to the cloud.

Work and life changed… for everyone

COVID-19 began to affect our lives less than a year after I started working. After spending several bleak months at home, I stripped my possessions to the bare essentials, packed my car, and left Boston. I started hopping to a new city every month while continuing to learn engineering by day at my remote 9-to-5. My nomadic lifestyle eventually caught the attention of management, and I became the target of escalating scrutiny as I continued to exploit the gray area of the company's policy during those unprecedented times. At around the 8-month mark, the vice president of my department got involved. We had a casual meeting where he made it clear that the crackdown was coming, and that I would eventually have to return to Boston or resign. I thought hard about my values from that public library in the West Loop of Chicago, and I resigned that day.

(Check out this essay for more details about that period of my life.)

I had already been on the job hunt at that point, and it didn't take long for an offer to come in. This was a watershed moment for me. I had chosen to believe that I was valuable enough to stop hanging on to a job that encroached too much on my independence, and shortly after releasing that rope, the next one appeared just within reach. My salary doubled, confidence soared, and I felt intense assuredness that I was heading in the right direction. I put a date on my last day at Definitive and booked an impromptu weekend trip to Colorado. I had always wanted to go, and wound up meeting a new love interest there. It was one of those unique times when I seemed to be flying down the road and hitting only green lights.

A test of principles

On my last day in Chicago, I answered a cold call from a headhunter. Crypto and Web3 were all over the news at the time, and the 2021 alt season had hit its peak a couple of weeks prior. The man told me about an innovative Web3 startup that was building a smart city in Nevada and was looking for developers with my skills. I told him that I happened to be starting a new job the following day, but his pitch interested me, so I agreed to an introduction.

In the following weeks, I started my new role at a company based in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I accepted the role knowing that they were working remotely due to COVID restrictions, but that I would eventually be expected to report to work in Newburyport. They had put a date on that, but they postponed that scheduled return to the office shortly after my first week. I had been staying with my cousin in Atlanta, and given the newly found extension of my job's remote nature — a pattern I'd become quite used to at my previous company — I made arrangements to move to Denver for a month or so. I politely made my manager aware of this plan, and was met with surprising pushback. Although I wasn't allowed in their office, I apparently wasn't allowed to move from Atlanta to Denver either. I returned to lengthy deliberations with myself over this junction. It felt like I was right back at Definitive, and it was only my third week at this company. I gave my manager a strong and gracious heads-up that I was going anyway, and I kept my travel plans.

Shockingly, the sun still came up that day I joined our morning meeting from Denver. I had faced off with authority for the second time that year and emerged unscathed again. At that point, I had also gone through three rounds of interviews with the Web3 startup I had heard about a month before. They soon made me an offer for a permanently remote role as an engineer, and after five short weeks, I left my job again.

Working for a startup

Near the end of 2021, I joined a startup in Reno, Nevada called Blockchains Inc. They were building software that used the decentralized protocol Self Sovereign Identity (SSI) to share data between entities. I joined the Web Team as a Web Engineer where I was responsible for building user interfaces that implemented a REST API the Backend Team provided. I worked closely with backend developers when testing new endpoints they delivered. A problem I noticed early on was that I would receive user stories from product managers that included a Figma file they collaborated with the Design Team on, but no technical details. It was up to me to determine how to achieve the functionality implied by the design. I would talk to the Backend Team about this who also collaborated with the product manager on their API, but it was commonly obvious that the API endpoints for a feature were developed in isolation of the UI designs. It then fell on me to reconcile the differences. In my time there I built the onboarding flow of the application and reused the React components I built for it to create two more flows that were core to the application. Onboarding involved the user creating Verifiable Credentials for their account which are the standard units for sharing data with SSI. The creation of Verifiable Credentials became thematic to the app's core functionality, so building reusable components that enabled credential creation was critical for scaling functionality throughout the app while keeping user experience consistent.

Leading a team

Ten months into the two years I spent at Blockchains my manager left the company and I was selected to replace him as Technical Lead of the Web Team. This meant retaining all of the responsibilities of a Web Engineer while also inheriting ownership of the team's methodology and our app's architecture. It became my job to know the expectations of the product department and to make sure my team's needs were understood by the other teams we depended on. Communicating my team's technical capabilities through both discussion and documentation became a way to empower the company to solve problems collaboratively instead of in silos. We then bootstrapped a new React app using Next.js and migrated all of the functionality we had built in the legacy app over to Next.js. During the migration, I made architectural decisions to deviate from bad practices that were holding us back in the legacy app. The old app used a store to hold large amounts of global state. Many would have reached for a state management library to streamline that developer experience, but I opted to simplify our state management strategy altogether so we didn't need convoluted data stores or third-party tools. I hired two senior developers to advise me on architectural best practices and one junior developer who I learned even more from by teaching things I thought I understood.

An unexpected pivot

My time at Blockchains ended at the surprising announcement that all engineers at the company were being laid off. I sent out resumes for a few months while my unemployment benefits from the state of Florida were contingent on my doing so, but it was clear to me that my heart wasn't in this exercise. I was probably overly prideful at that time, but I was also hyper-focused on my independence. I didn't want to wait by the phone; I wanted to be the one making phone calls.

Before the layoff, I had gotten quite involved in local small business networks. Geographic autonomy had been quite important to me in 2021, but ironically, I pretty much settled down once my home base was completely up to me. I had been proudly based in Fort Collins, Colorado, for almost two years, and was consistently attending local business meetups. I was invigorating a newfound appreciation for business, and although I wasn't a businessman, I was welcomed in these circles and enjoyed engaging with them. I had also become a diligent student of acquisition entrepreneurship and was consistently testing my findings in discussions with these local affinity groups.

Unemployment only amplified my passions. I put more hours into personal software projects and continued searching for a business to buy. I went on dozens of coffee dates with local businessmen and marketed myself as an Entrepreneur and Tech Professional. Finding a job had taken a back seat, if it was even still in the car.

Back to China

Meanwhile, an old travel buddy of mine found himself in Shanghai teaching English. I was busy and unemployed, but didn't let that get between me and my core values. I flew out and stayed with him for several weeks, and Shanghai blew me away. The dynamism of Asia was already undeniable to me, and seeing several other bastions of excitement like Taipei and Hong Kong throughout that trip brought the idea of living abroad to the forefront of my mind. During the trip, I was offered a job as an English teacher. The expat lifestyle was suddenly in reach, but it would mean leaving Fort Collins behind.

I talked it over with my girlfriend, and we decided to go for it. We sold off our stuff and prepared for a career pivot and international relocation. I was lifting off again en route to Shanghai, less than three months after I had just returned.

Teaching 4th grade

I spent the '24-'25 school year teaching English to nine-year-olds. Though quite new and stimulating as a career, my core values hadn't changed. I was in Shanghai to see the world, and the teachers' lifestyle allowed for a great deal of travel, both domestic and international. I'm proud to say I've explored a great deal of China and greater Asia, and am excited to continue doing so. That said, technology and business were still my passions, and I was determined to reincorporate them in my life.

They had never fully left. As a teacher in China, I wasn't given many resources, and I tended to build my own solutions when necessary. I had my own assignment management system for tracking my students' grades, and I built an app on top of that, which I onboarded all of their parents to. This enabled me to publish grades to them asynchronously and drastically reduced the time I had to spend explaining their report cards. I also got an AWS certification, taught myself PHP and WordPress through personal projects, and started applying for part-time work.

At this point, AI was everywhere, and learning the ABCs of a new tech stack was completely achievable in a few months. I landed my first freelance client in December and decided that I wouldn't renew my contract when the school year ended in July.

Back into the great unknown

That summer, I returned to Beijing Language and Culture University for another four-week language program. My Mandarin wasn't beginner-level anymore, and I was proud to be pursuing something I cared about in an interesting place. I held on tight to my only freelance client and started to think hard about how I would turn it from a side-hustle into a main-hustle. I asked myself what going pro looked like for a freelancer. I decided to buy a small Linux server and started running Kubernetes on my own infrastructure. I doubled down on education and kept using AI as a teacher of tech literacy. I made a habit of regularly reaching out to old connections to see if they had anything I could work on. I kept my schedule full, no matter how much paid work I had to do.

Things have picked up since then, and I'm gradually making my way to legitimacy. I engaged a dynamic startup founder who put me on to new tricks of the trade. I started running powerful virtual private servers in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's generous Always Free tier. We would only write code as a last resort, defaulting to self-hosted open-source solutions like n8n, Supabase, and Appsmith whenever possible. It opened my mind to doing things the best way instead of the way I already knew how. AI was the key to figuring out the best way quickly, and my local Kubernetes cluster was the perfect sandbox for anything I deployed to OCI.

Then, my first client started to completely revolutionize the WordPress project we were working on with AI agents that he was self-hosting. This piqued my interest and made me even more excited about the new age of software. I kept picking up work with new and old friends along the way, gaining valuable experience with WooCommerce, SEO, and integrated DevOps engineering skills that all independent tech consultants should have.

What's next

I've been out on my own for a few months, and I'm still hyper-focused on business generation. Learning is my highest priority, and I'm open to any professional engagements that facilitate it. I'm open to full or part-time remote work, contracts, and contributing to open-source projects. I have many projects of my own that remain in flux and will continue to start new ones.

The moral

This essay was meant to be a reflective brain dump where my core values would shine through. I plan to splice and form this content into blog posts, LinkedIn/tweets, marketing copy for my business HQ website, and resume bullet points. Follow my journey at spenpo.com to see how it evolves.