I started my career as a software engineer in the defense industry and rapidly transitioned into a research and development group. This provided valuable experience both in terms of learning a rigorous software development process as well as understanding the needs of rapid software development in a research environment. I then decided I wanted to apply the software engineering skills I had acquired to help advance medical and genomics research. It was at this time that I transitioned to Jackson Laboratory and since that time I have been focused on developing software tools that help researchers answer questions that help them advance the understanding of genetics and genomics. These tools can take many forms ranging from command line utilities that process and analyze large amounts of data to full web applications with interactive visualizations.