So what brought me to this point of thinking I could compete in the competitive world of personal finance budgeting applications? Well, for those interested, here is my story…

My name is Dustin Davis. I grew up in the Small town of Roosevelt Utah. I had two main passions growing up, computers and sports. My real dream was to play major league baseball. I broke my arm Dave Dravecky style pitching in the the state tournament my senior year. That was probably the first time that dream started to fade. After graduating I fulfilled a goal to serve a mission for the LDS church. I spent two years in South Africa and loved the experience. When I returned home, the dream of being a baseball player wasn’t nearly as strong. I was more concerned with finding a wife, having a family, and supporting that family. That is where my other passion comes into play.

I guess it may seem strange that a person who loves sports also loves the idea of sitting in front of a computer all day. I’ve since found that it is not so uncommon. I started working in the medical field at Intermountain Healthcare thanks to the help of my older brother. I started out answering medical insurance customer support calls and processing medical claims. I hated it! But soon I landed in QA, where I felt was a much better fit for my interests. From there I was recruited to move on to bigger and better and started working at 3M at the age of 23. It wasn’t until a few years later that I finally got my bachelors degree in Computer Science from Weber State University, but by then I was already working in the field, so the degree didn’t mean a whole lot to me. I was fortunate to work for great companies that reimbursed my tuition so I never had to take out a student loan.

At 3M I was a QA automation engineer. Basically, I felt it was my job to make life easier and less monotonous for my co-workers, and to get more done in less time. It was fun most of the time, but my real passion was web development. I spent a lot of my time on the side doing freelance work and also working on various personal websites and projects. I just loved learning new things.

In March 2006 I decided to leave the super big company for something much smaller. I guess it was the small town boy in me that wanted to get out of the big company. Also, it was a chance to do something different and actually call myself a "software engineer" rather than "automation engineer". No offense to automation engineers, it was just hard to explain to people exactly what it was that I did. One of the problems I found with working for a large company was that I didn’t really feel was making that big of a difference. Yeah, I was helping my team and they continually offered thanks for the work I did, but I wanted to help more people and have my presence felt.

The side jobs got busy enough that I felt it was time to take it a bit more seriously so I started an S-Corp called Red Seam, Inc. and did all my side projects and freelance work under this company name. (I got the name for this company by staring at a baseball – the passion never left!)

In 2008, I was spending most of my time working with PHP code, both on the side and my day job. The buzz about Ruby on Rails kept getting louder and louder. I tried it out a few times and wasn’t all that keen about learning a new language. After 8 years I had become quite fond of PHP. I also tried some PHP frameworks – mainly CakePHP. It had some cool features and seemed to make hard monotonous things easy, yet easy things hard.

Finally I determined I would go with Ruby on Rails and set out to stick with it. Well the determination wasn’t that strong I guess, because in the middle of learning about it I heard about Django. The funny thing was that I heard about Django through Rails evangelists. I enjoyed watching their funny videos comparing Ruby on Rails to PHP in a Mac vs PC parody way. When they made a video comparing Rails to Django they didn’t really find much to make fun of. I don’t know what it was for sure, but Django seemed more appealing to me. Maybe it was because it started with a D. Maybe it was because it’s theme colors were green instead of red. Maybe it was because they termed their framework MTV rather than MVC. Maybe it was a combination of all this, but my focus shifted to learning Django instead.

It definitely was not an easy switch. I felt like an old dog trying to learn new tricks. Nevertheless, I stuck with it and I’m so glad I did. I rekindled my passion for programming. After doing a few projects using the Django framework I finally felt I had the tools to build something large scale that would NOT be nightmare to maintain.

Around this time a friend approached me and asked if I could help him learn web development. I told him my idea about writing my own budget application. I started writing some proof of concept screens and couldn’t stop after that. I just kept going and going. I got so into it that I pretty much stopped doing freelance work so I could focus on this project.

That’s pretty much where I am at today and that is how Inzolo was born.