Independent Software Engineer
Artisan Digital Creative, Inc.
2012 – Present
My sub-chapter S corporation providing software development services to clients across industries — retail, automotive, energy, agriculture, entertainment, legislative tech — and more recently, building my own AI-powered products. Full lifecycle work: discovery through architecture through delivery through store submission.
Featured Projects
Case Files: With the Detective
Interactive mystery game where players solve classic detective stories through AI conversation. Players interrogate suspects, examine evidence, and build their case — with progression gated on demonstrated reasoning, not keyword matching.
Engineered a multi-persona LLM system with distinct character voices that maintain consistent personality across conversations. Designed adaptive difficulty through prompt engineering, adjusting hint density, tone, and evaluation strictness per mode. The reasoning evaluation system assesses whether the player actually understands the solution, not whether they've guessed the right words. Full-stack: Flutter/Dart, Claude API, iOS In-App Purchases.
DropWord — Puzzles
Native iOS word puzzle game designed and built from the ground up in Swift and SwiftUI, shipping a fully playable product with zero external dependencies. Blends Scrabble-style letter scoring with gravity-based tile placement on a 9×9 grid, featuring daily challenges, haptic feedback, custom theming, and a 170,000+ word dictionary.
Engineered a real-time word detection and scoring engine supporting Scrabble letter values, bonus squares, wildcard tiles, dead-letter penalties, and cross-word validation — fully rescanning the board on every tile placement. Designed zero-dependency SwiftUI architecture with clean config/state/view separation, reactive theming for light and dark mode, and a 3-second animated undo system. Shipped a daily challenge feature with seeded puzzle generation, persistent completion tracking, and context-aware UI state — all within the existing architecture without restructuring.
Sophi.bot
AI-powered educational platform using Socratic dialogue to develop student critical thinking. The core innovation is an LLM prompt architecture that inverts typical chatbot behavior — the AI asks questions rather than answering them, guiding students toward understanding through inquiry rather than providing answers directly.
Built an evaluation system that generates comprehension reports without human grading through conversational AI — validating responses against configurable concept rubrics. Implemented privacy-first architecture (magic link auth, auto-expiring data, no PII storage) exceeding education compliance requirements. Full-stack: Flutter/Dart, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, Firebase.
Selected Client Work
TrackBill
Four years of feature development on native iOS and Android apps for a legislative tracking startup. Built push notifications, offline sync, and advanced search against a complex API aggregating pending legislation at national and state levels — multiple service calls per screen to assemble comprehensive bill data. Managed both App Store and Play Store presences throughout the engagement.
Pennzoil
Native iOS/Android apps and a Unity-based Google Cardboard VR experience featuring a 360° immersive ride in a Ferrari 488 GTB — an early adoption of consumer VR technology when the platform was still novel.
Arch Coal
Enterprise iPad app for logging daily mining operations data — explosive charge specifications including size, depth, and blast patterns. Complex local business logic generating detailed daily operational reports, entirely offline-capable. Deployed via enterprise distribution, not the public App Store.
Famous Footwear
Led maintenance and new feature development of native iOS/Android retail apps, including shopping cart, store locator, and loyalty program integration. This engagement built the client relationship that later led directly to the Rack Room Shoes contract.
Monsanto
Developed a calculation engine for chemical and monetary conversions based on client-provided equations — intricate business logic translating agronomic formulas involving field size, crop type, soil conditions, and application methods into user-facing tools.
Additional Projects
Tidy Cats — No More PU Campaign: Mobile web app integrating Twitter and YouTube APIs for user-generated content submission and social engagement.
Energizer — Now That's Positive Energy: Mobile web app integrating Bazaarvoice Platform API for user-generated content submission and display, including photo/video uploads and ratings.
Pennzoil SEMA: Trade show iPad kiosk app with dynamic video content via Dropbox API and sign-up engine.
Stihl: Native iOS marketing application using WordPress as CMS.
JTI/NACS: iOS/Android tablet app for trade show use with magnetic and optical scanner hardware integration.