My name is Chase Franklin and I am a full stack web developer living in Raleigh, NC. I am 37 years old and I love all things web! Full stack development, web design, content management systems, SEO/digital marketing, user experience, and more!

My journey into web development started much later in life. I originally went to college at North Carolina State University for psychology and French, but sometimes life comes at you fast and you have to adjust!

I dropped out of school and spent the next seven years grinding it out in the food industry for Jimmy John’s. I started as a delivery driver and worked my way into guerilla marketing, assistant management, before becoming a marketing director, a general manager, and ultimately area manager. After several conversations with a high school friend, I took on a role as a regional manager for a local, family-owned chain of Japanese restaurants in upstate South Carolina called Fuji. I spent the next two and a half years helping them grow their business.

The food industry taught me a lot, including about what it takes to run a business and how to manage one, but felt I needed new challenges in life and not finishing college always haunted me, so I decided to get out of the food industry and attended The Iron Yard Coding School and completed their Front End Engineering program in 2016. I learned to build websites and applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This included jQuery, Backbone, and React. Most importantly, The Iron Yard taught me how to use the many resources out there to learn and figure out how to do the things I need to do.

I went on to get my first development contract at EP + Co building the UX in Angular 2/Typescript for the first iteration of the Denny’s On Demand online ordering application. I had never used Angular before and was nervous about being able to contribute in such a short amount of time (the contract was originally for four weeks and got extended for another two), but with the skills I gained from The Iron Yard, was able to make great contributions to the project.

Since that time I have worked as a digital engineer for a startup managing their WordPress site. I wore many hats as I uploaded content daily, created new templates, enhanced SEO, and even designed infographics and marketing materials. I also went on to work as a front end developer for Chumney & Associates where I coded emails and content pages daily for automotive clients, created new templates, and enhanced existing ones.

After being laid off due to a global pandemic and a lot of soul-searching, I decided to go back to school. I started by finishing an Associate of Arts degree from Greenville Technical College on the President’s list, before moving back to Raleigh in the summer of 2021. I worked for a year to get in-state tuition and attended Wake Technical Community College in the fall of 2022. As of May 2024, I have graduated on the President’s List and earned an Associate of Applied Science degree in web development and am ready to share my talents with an awesome team!