Welcome!

First I want to say thank you for stopping into the site! If you've made it to this point of the site, you've clearly intentionally clicked through to this blog post, and that means a ton.
Now, let me introduce my-self. My name is Reed Mershon, I was raised in Austin, Texas where I got to experience so much of what made Austin special during the early 2000s. I attended a small liberal arts college, Hendrix College, where I was one of 7 computer science majors in my senior class. This experience has brought me here, to this site and to all my previous experiences both professionally and personally. Through having a small class size, I was able to better foster relationships with both friends and professors. It was incredibly easy to knock on a professor's door and get help.This helped me go from an average student through high school and my first year of college, to an over achieving one my last three years of college. While at Hendrix, I was a defenseman and captain of the lacrosse team (DIII), and led the team to the best season in our program's history. Through the lacrosse team, I created life long friends, and gained valuable time management and leadership skills.

After graduating college, I worked a software consulting job at IBM. For the first year I joined a team tasked with creating a proof of concept (POC) solution to solve a major fast food chain's "connected restaurant". We were a small team of about 15, utilizing many different skills like computer vision, machine learning, and IOT devices to accomplish the end goal of automating an entire restaurant. I was working closely with one other developer to create what I would call the nervous system of the restaurant. This essentially communicated with the predicted cooking needs (brains), computer vision assessments of the current inventory (eyes) and the automated cooking devices (arms) to orchestrate the entire operation. Through this project, I quickly learned how to build products from 0 --> 1 and thrived in the stressful environment. My time working on the POC had me traveling every week between Chicago or New York, and even a few on-site deployments of our product across the country. After completing a year with the project, I stepped away to continue to grow in new technologies and roles. I worked on teams building internal tools and more client facing projects focusing and honing my fullstack expertise. The latter took me to India, where we had a team of over 100 devs.

Through those first two years of working I gained invaluable experience, but knew the time had come to explore new opportunities. Looking for a 180 flip to the corporate life, I started looking for smaller companies to interview at. I received an offer for a software engineer role at AppSumo. This is where I feel like my skills have really grown. During my time at AppSumo, I've continued to learn both as a developer and as a systems engineer. I've continued to see my skills grow, and constantly look back at old code, wondering how I ever thought that was passable. I’ve gotten to lead several highly impactful projects. Namely, developing an inhouse rewards and referrals system to incentivise more engagement with the site and drive more conversions. And most recently getting to develop AI pipelines to help automate some extremely time consuming workflows for teammates, saving the team time and a great amount of money along the way. However,  I think the most important thing I've learned though, has been just how important having teammates around you that you enjoy working with. That is something I'll always look for when I eventually look for a new role.

As for my personal life, much of my growth has come along the way with my time at AppSumo. Hanna, my wonderful fiance, and I were dating at the time I started at AppSumo, in early 2021. We had made it through covid together. Getting by through our love of cooking, taking long walks in the evening though my neighborhood in South Austin, and finding anyway to pass the boredom of those early months during covid. In 2021 I got a dog, Maple, and learned so much about being responsible for another being. She's taught me so much (mostly that I'm not quite ready for a real human baby anytime soon), and I think she's grown into the best dog I could ever have imagined. By 2023 I had already known Hanna was the one for me, there was no one I'd ever felt more easy with. From those early long walks, to nights out with friends, and raising a dog together, I continued to find reasons why Hanna was all I'd ever need. So in the spring of 2023, I proposed to Hanna, on a walk through those same neighborhoods we'd learned so much about each other in. And by that summer we were moving across the country to Charlottesville, Virginia for her residency to begin.

Charlottesville is where my passion for cycling and running has exploded. Back in Austin, I had always ran for exercise, but never enjoyed it. I always found it tough, and painful in the end. Always gasping for air, and feeling like I'd just jumped into a swimming pool. I'll blame the Texas summers for the last one. But it wasn't until moving to Charlottesville, and coinciding with my increase in time on the bike, that I found running fun. Now going out for an hour run feels normal, I can "take it easy" and it actually is easy. Even during college, when I was playing lacrosse, I never quite felt natural at running long distances. Maybe it's the increased cycling that pushed me to be better, which went from ~3ish hours a week in Austin, to up to nearly 9 hours a week during my time in Charlottesville. In any case, I've never felt healthier or happier than I do now. I still enjoy a beer or two on the weekends, and I still eat out with friends and family, but I also know my body will carry me through anything now. While I feel great, I also know there is much room for improvement, both physically and mentally.

Thank you again, for reading through this far! I really just want to have a place to document my life for the future as a way to look back and see tangible growth. If you're interested in following along, for life experiences and maybe a few professional ones too, please shoot me an email! Or drop a comment in the email form on my about me page, I'd love to connect and hear any feedback you have