TL;DR
Hi – I’m Nicholas Tuck!
Programmer Portfolio
Past Presentations | Future Events
My Why
Software Gardening
Resume
LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog | Instagram
My Why
I want to make a meaningful contribution to the world. That’s what drives me at my core. My life led me to falling in love with technology and getting pretty good at designing and creating software. So I have focused my career on how to make a positive contribution to the world within the software industry. This includes creating innovative software, facilitating innovative approaches to collaboration and speaking on these subjects to spread these concepts further than I would ever be able to do on my own. I spend time constantly re-assessing my goals and you can see more about what motivates me on My Why page.
What I’ve Done
I have been programming since 2003 and building web enterprise systems since 2009. I have had a lot of success creating software and am very proud of the different products I’ve been able to help with. This ranges from small business sites to enterprise services for the Air Force to mobile applications supporting health industries. More specifics of these jobs can be seen on my resume. I am most surprised by the teams, cultures and communities I have been fortunate to help bring together. I have been an agile advocate since 2011, helping transform company cultures which lead me to adopting the Software Gardener mindset. I helped start the Agile for Defense meetup, creating a community of government and defense members finding better ways to build software. I have been public speaking since 2014 at Agile for Defense and other meetup which led me to speaking around the larger community and at conferences. You can find my Past Presentations here and Future Events here.
How I’m Different
I enjoy challenging everything. I don’t accept much on the surface until I can reconcile it with my own mental models of the world. This approach to life has led me to always be striving for something better, something more innovative than the status quo. I have a tenacity for learning that allows me to discover those better ways. This includes learning through other’s experiences like reading books and connecting with people, as well as through discovery of new techniques via experimentation with my own experiences. See my Reading List for what has impacted me the most! This blog is a place for me to share many of the concepts that have helped me start creating that difference in the world that I am striving for.
How I Got Started
I’ve been fiddling with software since I was in middle school. I made my first website on Homestead, with fun sound effects and guest books. I got into animation with Flash 5 submitting random things to Newgrounds. I used Dreamweaver as my first IDE to publish my first real coding website on Angelfire. Officially I took my first programming classes in high school and competed in a couple of programming contests. I attended the University of Nebraska Lincoln graduating with a major in Computer Science and minors in Math and Physics. During college I got a job creating small business websites with a guy in his basement (only kind of weird) and later creating custom web solutions with another small business. From there I started my career which can be seen in more detail on my Programmer Portfolio.
Outside of Software
Outside of software I get to be a crazy boy with my two sons. They allowed me to both grow up and never grow up at the same time. I heavily enjoy playing sports, bowling, mountain biking, camping/hiking/fishing, magic illusions, woodworking, yoyoing, photography, OneWheels + EUCs and competitive gaming. I enjoy hardcore philosophical conversations, both tough topics and silly ones. I absolutely love learning new things and exploring different hobbies, discovering the ones I can exploit the joy from before moving to the next.
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“Technology innovation isn’t about giving people what they want, but what they didn’t know they needed.” — Nick Tuck, Software Gardener
