A Decade of .NET Development for the State of Kansas
Application Developer, Kansas Department of Transportation & Kansas Department of Education
Before I moved into full-time IT support, I spent roughly a decade as an Application Developer for two Kansas state agencies — building and maintaining .NET applications used across state government. It's the least talked-about chapter of my career on this site, and probably the most substantial one.
Kansas Department of Transportation
I worked as an Application Developer for KDOT, building and maintaining .NET applications used internally across the department. State transportation agencies run on a lot of purpose-built line-of-business software — asset tracking, permitting, project and infrastructure data — and that's the world I was working in day to day.
It was my first real exposure to enterprise-scale development: working within existing systems and constraints, writing code that other state employees depended on to do their jobs, and learning what it actually takes to support software at that scale rather than just building something and moving on.
Kansas Department of Education
From there, I moved to the Kansas Department of Education, again as an Application Developer, continuing the same kind of .NET work in service of a different mission — supporting the systems and data that Kansas schools and administrators across the state rely on.
Between the two agencies, this chapter of my career spanned roughly a decade of building and supporting real, mission-critical software for the State of Kansas.
The Stack
This work centered on the Microsoft development stack — the same foundation that still shows up in how I think about systems today:
How It Connects to Today
Both agencies were, at their core, public-service organizations depending on software that had to actually work — not flashy, not experimental, just reliable. That's a mindset I carried straight into IT support and infrastructure work, and it's a big part of why I ended up at Kansas Legal Services today, another Kansas organization built entirely around a public mission.