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Who is Caralee?

I recently realized that I have been sharing my experiences frequently with recruiters, hiring managers, and various industry professionals. This provides me the perfect opportunity to present my narrative, showcase an updated resume, and share valuable context about my presence in the job market and who I am as an individual. While being qualified for a position is crucial, finding a cultural fit within a company and a team is equally essential.

Below you'll see some highlights from my past work experiences and overall skillset. Below that you'll find a little bit more about me and how I live my life outside of work. If you just want to jump to the details, feel free to go straight to me resume.

...and why does she need a website?

The Early Years

This section is still a work in progress, but here's the gist!

I have been working with computers since even before the Apple IIe when we had a top of the line Atari with a keyboard that gave you a Basic prompt when powered on without a cartridge. We were fortunate that my small town happened to be home to a local telephone company that became one of the first ISPs in the area so we had internet access before most of the midwest. I remember one particular man in town, I sadly forget his name but he was excited to find others interested in technology and helped us connect to a BBS he ran. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college learning mIRC text format syntax to ensure my chatroom was the coolest.

I originally shied away from a computer science major given the focus in math (I'm that weird engineer who doesn't care for math) until I found CIS (then Computer Management at Eastern Illinois University) which focused on practical application of computer programming in business (so now I'm that weird engineer with a business degree). I liked the idea of a business degree, it felt more practical than math and honestly, it gave me a basic knowledge of things like finance, accounting, management, etc that has been extremely useful in my every day life.

I finished my degree in 2001 right as Java was exploding. I was one of the last graduating classes to focus primarily on mainframe-oriented technology. They began offering classes in Java the semester after I graduated but I was fortunate enough to take C, C++ and VB6 so I didn't entirely miss out on the upcoming object-oriented revolution.

...and beyond

Since college I've worked in so many languages, platforms, industries and roles I can barely name them all. I started out as a mainframe programmer writing COBOL, JCL, Dyl280 (which doesn't even get its own page on wikipedia apparently) for one of the earliest cellular billing platforms. At the time you couldn't move your number from one provider to the other until LNP was implemented.

From there I moved to Accenture Technology Solutions, Accenture's big step into hiring technical professionals, where I wrote on MicroFocus COBOL on Linux and found my love of SQL. Eventually I decided if I wanted to stay in tech, I should probably do something that doesn't involve COBOL and was fortunate enough that a former co-worker of mine needed an experienced developer and a Java developer, but didn't have the budget for an experienced java developer. He said "don't worry, I know you can do it" and so I switched gears to write Java and support an e-commerce platform.

There's still a lot more left but I need to publish the site so some links work so I'm going to publish this as is and say...

...to be continued!