Jordan Morgan wandered aimlessly through his first years of Ozarks Technical Community College trying to discover his passion. Morgan went to school for four years without a major. “I had all these classes and met a career counselor, and they recommended programming,” he says.
Excellence in Technology
Jordan Morgan is the 2019 Excellence in Technology Developer of the Year Award Winner
Through writing for his own blog, Swiftjective-C, Jordan Morgan became known within the iOS developer community and landed himself a competitive position with Buffer, proving he's worthy of the title of Developer of the Year.
By Juliana Goodwin
May 2019
Photo by Brandon AlmsDeveloper of the Year Award Winner: Jordan Morgan, iOS Software Engineer for Buffer
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“I started to write about things I knew, was learning, problems I was solving... I started writing to scratch that itch.”— Jordan Morgan, iOS Software Engineer
Morgan enjoyed video games but wasn’t a math wizard, so he almost didn’t explore programming because he assumed his math skills weren’t strong enough. He ordered his first book and was nervous as he flipped through, but something clicked inside him, and Morgan breezed through the next two years. In 2013, he landed his first full-time tech job. The following year, Morgan launched his own tech blog from his home in Ozark, focusing on iOS applications. “It’s been one of my greatest assets of my career,” he says. “To this day there is not a huge iOS developer community in southwest Missouri. I am extraverted, so I wanted to be a part of the community. I started it to write about things I knew, was learning, problems I was solving. I love iOS and I started writing to scratch that itch.”
One day, Chris Lattner, then an Apple software developer who created the programming language called Swift, discovered the blog and Tweeted it out. Overnight, Morgan went from having a few readers to being recognized nationwide. The blog, swiftjectivec.com, helped him land a job at Buffer, which is highly competitive. “When I go to conferences, people will be like, ‘You write that blog,’” Morgan says. “It has opened a lot of doors for me.”
RUNNERS UP // Chris Bailey, City Utilities • Austin Cummins, Added Innovation
NAILED IT
"It was an honor when I was approached by our senior management team asking me to join the Design Committee for our new corporate office at Farmers Park. Prior to Farmers Park, we had technology that was convenient but we were missing what we needed to be even more efficient (e.g. web conferencing, collaboration, employee mobility). I take a great deal of pride in knowing I was able to share my input on technology to raise the bar and see it come together at Farmers Park."—Jordan Morgan, iOS Software Engineer
FAILED IT
“Early in my management career at a different bank, I made the decision to move an application that was hosted in a vendor data center to the bank’s internal data center. (This was before hosting applications were popular.) This particular hosted application was less than reliable, and we often found it a challenge to get the service we needed when issues occurred. Based on those issues and service, I thought that if I brought the application into my data center I could fix it faster and wouldn’t have to rely on someone else telling me it was broken. Unaware of the time, the effort and regulatory issues of bringing that application in-house would cause, I quickly outsourced it six months later."—Jordan Morgan, iOS Software Engineer
