I’m Brad Dunn. I live in Michigan.
I’ve loved making things for as long as I can remember. I created my first program in the 5th grade in BASIC; from what I can remember it was a text-based adventure "game". I created the first version of this website when my dad, who was a web developer as well, gifted me this domain name as an easter gift in my early teens. I coded the webpage up in Microsoft Notepad (not Notepad++) by hand, doing some basic layouts using html tables. I delighted in the list of links of websites I found most interesting that I had published on my little corner of virtual real estate on the world wide web.
I set down web development until I caught the bug again in college. As a hobby, I began creating websites and web designs from scratch, helping folks out in the community by building them their little corner of the internet. Eventually, this work landed me my first professional job.
Eventually, I moved away from websites and more into the web application development space, creating custom internal tools for my alma matter in the higher ed space. This allowed me to grow as a developer and gave me experience solving real customer problems. I learned how to get to the heart of a problem and how to provide real value to folks.
I honed my engineering skills as an individual contributor, and eventually started to grow my leadership skills in roles ranging from senior engineer, tech lead, and a brief stint as a founder/CTO of my own startup. Nowadays, I've moved into people management and coach a great team of talented frontend-leaning engineers at DataStax.
Outside of work, I'm a dad with 3 awesome kids and a lovely wife. Our summers are spent camping, going on adventures and making memories. When I'm not hanging out with the family, I'm probably noodling on the bass guitar.