Tadd
Eells

Joined in November 2021 with 8 years of prior experience to work on business-critical APIs across partner workflows and membership systems for the U.S. Concealed Carry Association. Promoted to Senior Software Engineer after 4.5+ years — one of several backend engineers on the B2B team, building the APIs and systems that power business partner membership programs. Increasingly leaning into that seniority through team-level leadership, including initiatives that align engineering practices across teams.

LPi started as a print shop for church bulletins before building a real business around the ad space inside them — for some churches, ad revenue eventually covered printing entirely and then some. From there grew WeConnect, a CMS letting churches build and manage their own websites, and ParishesOnline, a searchable directory of churches nationwide. I spent five-plus years on the PHP team behind both, growing from a junior engineer shipping small fixes into a full engineer owning backend services end-to-end — deep in REST APIs and MySQL schema design, the same backend foundation I still build on today. Part of what kept me there that long was the company's growing interest in newer infrastructure like Cloudflare and AWS, an interest that's carried straight through into how I build things now.

Hired as a Junior Software Engineer to rebuild manufacturing software in PHP at ThermoSoft, a vertically-integrated manufacturer of electric radiant floor heating and snow-melting systems — and pivoted to vanilla JavaScript on day one, before React or Vue existed, with a senior colleague's help getting the core architecture off the ground. About 90% of the build from there was solo: a full single-page application integrating with SAP Business One to manage an entire production pipeline, from bill of materials and serial number generation to barcode printing and scanning at each stage, electrical QA tracking, custom reporting, and end-to-end UPS shipping integration. From raw wire to shipped product. Winning over a skeptical warehouse team ended up mattering as much as the code itself — the software only succeeded once the people using it trusted it. It's still in production today, since enhanced but still built on that original work.

Started scripting in LSL (Linden Scripting Language) inside Second Life — learning by reverse-engineering open-source scripts. Built and sold 45 products under the Lastat Productions brand — Contest Boards (my best seller), Schedule Boards, Event Boards, Auction Systems — the unglamorous infrastructure other in-game business owners used to actually run their operations, backed by a large support group I ran for customers. Reinvested the income by hiring developers inside the game and learning from their more complex implementations. Realized this was a career, enrolled in college, and earned an Associate's in Computer Information Systems plus Web Development and .NET certificates — and kept the store running for years afterward, alongside the early stretch of that professional career.