About Me

Bio

Hello! My name is Harper Foley and I currently live in Seattle with my wife, two boys (3 & 1 y/o), and 90lbs labradoodle.

I am originally from Uvalde, TX where I grew up doing all the quintessential Texan activities like hunting, fishing, and competing in the rodeo, as well as some “less Texan” activities such as playing tennis. Additionally, I competed at the international level in shotgun shooting sports, specifically American Skeet. I competed heavily in this sport and became a certified coach at the age of 14. Some of my accomplishments before Junior Year of high school were feature in Landscapes magazine; feel free to give it a read if you find yourself bored enough!

I come from a family of private pilots and, inspired by the movie “Top Gun”, I set my sights on becoming a naval aviator by attending the United States Naval academy after graduating high school. While at the Naval Academy, I majored in History and minored in Japanese, and competed on Navy’s D1 crew team and the Navy Karate Team. During my first year at Navy, I watched non-stop news coverage of the roadside bomb epidemic in Iraq and Afghanistan that was maiming and killing dozens of US service members and civilians every day. I decided to shift my focus from becoming a pilot and train for Special Operations and become a Bomb Disposal Technician.

After two years of screening, I was selected as one of 12 Midshipmen to serve as a Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Officer. I spent eight years leading small teams of elite technicians running operations all around the globe defusing ordnance both on land and underwater. My last duty station was at Whidbey Island, WA, where I was responsible for emergency EOD operations across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska (~1 million square miles of territory!).

When my sons were born in 2019 and 2021, I decided that a career jumping out of planes and defusing bombs underwater probably wasn’t in the best long-term interest of my family and decided to separate from service in May of 2022. After some self-study, I was able to break into technology investment banking working in M&A advisory with Houlihan Lokey. I enjoyed digging into reams of financial data to constructing complex and dynamic Excel spreadsheets, as well as writing VBA code to automate many routine manual processes. When I realized that I enjoyed hacking Excel formulas and VBA code to replace hours and hours of manual work more than I did actually conducting the financial analysis and advisory, I decided to leave investment banking and pursue a career as a software engineer.

I currently am working on a project of my own, Rainier Racing Co., a Play-To-Earn (P2E) gaming market analysis company. The idea is to use the coding skills I develop throughout my time at Code Fellows to enhance the website and ultimately plug directly into the APIs of various games and their associate marketplaces and bring realtime market data to gamers. The ultimate goal is to create the “Capital IQ” or “Seeking Alpha” of P2E gaming.

Let's Play a Game...