Joey Hage

I grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota and moved to Iowa in 2013 when I decided to attend Iowa State University for software engineering. After my first year at ISU, I realized that understanding how businesses run by learning about finance, accounting, management, and marketing would be more applicable in the career I wanted than learning calculus and physics which were required for an engineering degree. I switched to Iowa State's Management Information Systems degree and graduated in May 2018.

I was able to obtain an internship at Principal Financial Group after my sophomore year at ISU and then went back to Principal for internships after my junior and senior years. I learned extensively about the software development lifecycle and practices like test driven development, application performance monitoring, and application security.

These experiences prepared me to start my career at Principal as a software engineer because I knew the technology stack, I had numerous connections and relationships, and I was familiar with Principal's business model. After multiple years at Principal in roles as a Software Engineer and a Cloud Information Security Engineer, I accepted a job at Dwolla as a Senior Software Engineer.

My experience at Dwolla has allowed me to become proficient in event-driven, microservice architecture using containers as well as building a redundant and fault tolerant system, designing easy-to-use APIs, and interacting with internal and external stakeholders.

In the last five-plus years as a full-time software engineer, I have continued to learn new things every day at work and also in my free time. The majority of my experience consists of full-stack development using Java, Scala, or Typescript as the server-side language and React or Next.js for client-side. The three aspects of software development I am most passionate about are test driven development, software security, and knowledge sharing.

I personally feel knowledge sharing is key to successful projects, fostering the culture of engineering teams, and developing talented employees. I also really enjoy teaching others; both in structured classroom environments and during pair/swarm programming. I think the biggest driver of my passion for teaching others is that I have learned a lot from the people I have worked with because they were willing, and often even excited, to share their knowledge. I would not be where I am today without those experiences and I enjoy passing that knowledge on to others and helping them to succeed.