About

Hello! I’m Cliff Meyers, a software engineer and architect. I’ve been living in Richmond, VA for over ten years now. I grew up around Rochester and Buffalo, NY. Ask me my opinion about ranch vs blue cheese.

This site has always been focused on work stuff, so most of what you’ll read about is related to software engineering.

Work

I’ve been working in tech consulting and software engineering for over 20 years now. While I’ve worked on quite a few teams, I’m especially proud of my time at @capitalone and @cloudbees. It was awesome to meet and work with so many talented and generous people over the years. These roles gave me the opportunity to work on the most challenging, exciting and impactful projects of my career.

Some of my areas of focus include user interface development, RESTful API design, data and domain modeling, automated software testing and build and pipeline automation.

My favorite front-end technologies include TypeScript, Angular, React, Astro and Android. It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of JS web frameworks over the years: we’ve definitely come a long way since jQuery but not every team can just rewrite their entire application in a new framework every three years either.

For back-end development, I am a huge fan of Java and the Spring framework. I’ve worked extensively with Spring Security and am amazed at the clean architecture and the breadth of features available. And I’ve probably built most of my StackOverflow reputation off Hibernate and JPA having worked with them for many years. Node.js gets the job done too, although I consider TypeScript a non-optional dependency.

Many years ago I worked extensively with Adobe Flash and Flex building rich internet applications that ran in Flash Player. I also did a lot of work with ColdFusion early on in my career along with some PHP, Python and Perl.

Life

Besides Central Virginia and Western New York, I also lived in Washington, DC and San Diego, CA for several years each. I’ve been really fortunate that the job has allowed me to live in a handful of different places across the United States. I’ve also traveled a lot for work and visited quite a few cities stateside - and once even made it to Japan! I was not imagining this when I first began coding at age sixteen, working on a Babylon 5 fan website 😆

Some of my interests include cooking, nice restaurants, traveling and in the past few years, cruising. I also follow politics, the National Football League and watch a lot of documentaries - especially world and American history.

I enjoy various sci-fi but I really grew up on Star Trek, enough to name the cat I adopted during the pandemic after the chief engineer on the Enterprise D. I also play a variety video games - Minecraft especially - and enjoy tabletop wargaming too.

If you’d like to see what else I’ve been up to lately, you can check out my code on GitHub. I also very occasionally browse Mastodon ever since Twitter became a total dumpster fire.