About me.

Hi, my name is Sam Spoerl. I'm a senior software engineer and I've been writing code since 2018.

Like many software developers, I got my start because of some tedious task I didn't want to do anymore. For me, it was a report that required a lot of manual parsing through data in a home-grown ERP system. I then spent an entire summer learning SQL in my free time to automate that report.

After that, I was forever changed. I discovered my love for automation and writing code. After college, I started my first job as a Supply Chain Analyst on a brand-new team. The team was effectively formed for a single initial purpose: to crank out reports.

These reports were an immensely manual process. Our data source was filled with unclean data, where we needed to understand that “PRODUCT” and “prdct” were the same thing. We estimated that it took about 40 hours on average to finish a report for a single product.

Driven by a dislike for manual processes, I learned Python to fill the gaps that SQL left in the process. Combining multiple queries with a fuzzy-wuzzy string match and pandas DataFrames, I was able to reduce the man hours to complete this task down to as little as a minute. We still had to wait for the program to run, but we were able to work on other, more fulfilling tasks while we waited.

That began my love affair with coding. Since then, I've explored myriad other languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, Java, and C#. Recently, I've worked mostly with .NET for work and Next.js for my personal projects.

These days I work in transaction advisory — due diligence and M&A — building automation and internal platforms for the people doing that work, plus the data pipelines and analytics underneath. What keeps it interesting is owning the whole lifecycle: finding the problem by watching how the work actually gets done, building the thing, shipping it, and keeping it running. There's a symmetry to it I didn't plan. I studied finance, transitioned into engineering, and wound up building software for the thing I studied in the first place.

Owning things end to end has meant getting my hands into everything — cloud infrastructure, Agile process, CI/CD, database design, and agentic development and tool integration. No language, framework, or technology is off limits. That's satisfied my intellectual itch and made me an all-around better engineer.

The reason any of it happened is that I love it. I find coding addicting. I love solving problems, and coding is one big, never-ending problem. Building an app, a feature, or learning a new skill feels like completing a level in Super Mario Bros. I get a little hit of dopamine with every commit.