You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m John King. I’ve been working in IT since 1997. I’m currently a Senior Software Engineering Manager at a FinTech company. Prior to working at my current employer, I had made my rounds through just about every position in IT including landing in a Chief Information Officer role for a couple of years. The positions I was most passionate about, since starting in IT, were in Software Development and IT Security. However, I also have experience as a systems engineer, network engineer, telecom guy, and database administrator among other IT positions.
I spent 23 years learning the credit union industry and have become somewhat of an expert in Online and Mobile Banking, Payments, Digital Transformation, and various other Financial Technology (FinTech) solutions. I have spent a lot of time writing source code and managing a highly successful web development team as well as managing other IT teams.
I started writing source code for Intranet apps early on in my career. I built a number of back office applications for process automation during that time. My software development career really gained traction when I designed and developed an online, electronic banking statement application for my company. That application resulted in thousands of dollars in savings on printing and postage costs each month. That’s when I knew software development was going to be key to my career growth.
After having been the only software developer at the company for many years (part-time alongside my other duties), I eventually created a new software development team. Shortly afterwards, I convinced my company to let me design an in-house online banking system to replace the existing third-party one. After getting that approval, we doubled the size of the development team to a whopping 4 people and got to work. 18 months later we had a very successful product launch that kicked off many more years of in-house development projects and continual growth of the development team.
Constantly researching and evaluating new technologies, I also built the company’s first hybrid mobile banking application for iOS and Android using PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova). Along with my team we built every online banking application the credit union needed to service its customers including online account opening, mobile check deposits, person-to-person payment applications, and many ACH-based transaction systems. My team was highly successful and we saved the company millions of dollars over the years.
After many years of success, I was asked to step into the Chief Information Officer role when it came available a few years ago. While still overseeing the software development team, my focus expanded to managing everything IT. Having held so many positions in IT previously, it didn’t take too long to get back up to speed in those areas. I enjoyed that role for two years but was presented with an opportunity to move into a newly created Chief of FinTech role that would allow me to focus on financial technology projects. That role ended up being short-lived unfortunately.
In 2020, I very unexpectedly found myself unemployed in the era of COVID-19 just like millions of other people. With that, I had some time to reflect on where to go from there. I’ve had so much success over the years in the software development world that it just made sense to focus on that again. I moved into a Principal/Staff Software Engineer role at the FinTech I currently work for and was promoted to Senior Software Engineering Manager in early 2021.
My goal with this blog was to start sharing what I know about writing code as well as sharing information I think might be useful to other people related to development projects that I’m working on. As life happens, I haven’t been successful in finding time to keep this blog updated regularly. Still, I have hopes to get this thing moving in the future. I’m hoping to make some contributions to the open source world as well; sharing the details of what and why here.
Want to chat about something you’ve seen on my website? Reach out to me here.
John