My name is Jon Seeley and I like computers. I currently work as a Principal Software Engineer in the travel and hospitality industry, where my daily work centers around APIs, distributed systems, and the kind of problems that only reveal themselves at scale.
This blog, its content, and all opinions contained herein are my own.
Background
I’ve been around.
Over more than twenty years in this field I’ve worked across a wide range of industries — insurance, finance, government, retail, DIY crafting, medical billing, travel — and held nearly every role the profession has to offer. Individual contributor, junior developer, senior developer, team lead, staff engineer, mentor, interviewer, architect. The breadth wasn’t always intentional. It turned out to be invaluable.
Earlier in my career I spent nearly six years at Mountain America Credit Union, where I started as a junior developer and worked my way into a senior and team lead role, eventually building and leading a .NET development team from the ground up. From there I moved into a web team lead role at Get Away Today Vacations, working primarily in ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, and AngularJS. I spent time as a consultant at Mindfire Technology, including a contract with the Utah State Government rewriting the unemployment insurance benefits system. After that I served as Staff Software Engineer at a medical billing company, where my team converted the organization from TFVC to Git, built a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins, and spent a meaningful amount of time decomposing a monolith.
From there I joined a major company in the DIY crafting and design space, where my role evolved considerably over time. I started as an API engineer, then shifted focus to championing testing culture across the organization — driving adoption at both the unit and end-to-end levels. I went on to lead the security team before moving into a product-focused engineering role leading the content team, where we built a content marketplace for aspiring and professional artists. It was one of the more varied and formative stretches of my career — the kind of experience that happens when a company is growing fast enough that the opportunities keep changing before you’ve finished the last one.
Most recently I’ve moved into principal-level engineering in the travel and hospitality space, where my work centers around APIs, distributed systems, and the kind of problems that only reveal themselves at scale.
The through-line across all of it: .NET, the web stack, and a growing conviction that the human side of this profession matters at least as much as the technical side.
Wait, you want more?
I have always had an affinity for technology. I built and maintained my own computers at twelve. I built and maintained my own — admittedly awful — tabletop RPG website at fifteen. I set up and tore down several lame BBSes in my early teens, tinkered with QBasic and C++ through junior high and high school, and found my way into the field professionally in the early 2000s writing C# and VB.NET on .NET 1.0.
Three of my five siblings are software engineers, which tells you something about the household I grew up in. My oldest brother Jason, seven years ahead of me in the field, is largely responsible for nudging me toward .NET before most people had heard of it — a nudge that shaped the trajectory of my entire career.
I speak — or perhaps better to say spoke — fluent Spanish. During college I did tech support in both English and Spanish, which eventually gave me enough of a foothold in software to land my first full-time development role.
I also just finished writing a book. It’s called Crash Course – A Semi-Technical Guide to Becoming a Software Engineer (who people actually want to work with) and it’s the long-form version of the things I keep telling junior engineers over and over — the parts of this profession that don’t show up in a curriculum. More on that very soon.
Personal Interests
I love video games and rarely get to play them anymore. Between Steam, GOG, and various other platforms I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,400 games in my collection. My oldest brother and I have been developing — and subsequently failing to finish — several games together for years. One of these days we’re going to actually ship one.
Most of my free time is spent with my family. We play board games and video games together, and the older kids all have their own hand-me-down computers cannibalized from previous machines, which feels appropriate.
Each year we try to travel and give the kids new experiences. Recent trips have included a cruise to Mexico, Washington DC and Virginia, the Redwoods in Northern California, and the Pacific Northwest. Utah’s mountains are a recurring and reliable favorite.