David Nguyen has a strict rule for motorcycle trips: know the destination, but figure out the route yourself. No GPS, no turn-by-turn directions. Just a pin on the map and the open road between here and there. It is the same philosophy he has carried through his entire career.
He grew up with his hands on engines, working alongside his father restoring cars from the age of 10. He spent a lot of time working on a 1980 Chevrolet Z28 Camaro T-top and a 1972 Chevrolet C10. It was the kind of work that teaches you how things fit together and what to do when they fall apart. That mechanical intuition carried him into computer science at Northwest Missouri State University, where he graduated in 2015, and then into a software career that has moved through Cerner, Garmin, and now WellSky.
At Cerner, he started as an intern on the Core EMR within HealtheIntent solutions and grew into a full-stack developer managing hundreds of API endpoints across the platform. At Garmin, he built APIs and microservices for the personal navigation device team. But what shaped him most during those years was the mentoring. Teaching interns and peers forced him to articulate complex ideas clearly, and it gave him a lasting instinct for meeting people wherever they are in their own learning.
That instinct is central to his work at WellSky, where he serves as a senior software engineer on the hospice and palliative care team. His biggest challenge became his proudest accomplishment: building the HOPE service from scratch in .NET, a framework he had never touched before. His background was Ruby on Rails, Spring Boot, and React. Within a few months, the service was in production. Today, his role has grown well beyond writing code. He guides teammates, shapes architecture decisions, and helps engineers lean on one another rather than working in isolation.
When he is not at his keyboard, David is almost certainly on his motorcycle. He and his roommate plan annual trips spanning six days and roughly three thousand miles, covering ground from the Rocky Mountains to the Great Lakes to the Smoky Mountains. He once rode 800 miles from Asheville, North Carolina, to Kansas City, Missouri, in a single day with friends. He has ridden straight through a tropical storm when Hurricane Ian made landfall in 2022. Rain or shine, the answer is always the same: ride.
For all the miles he has logged on motorcycles and all the systems he has built, David still has a few surprises. He can understand Vietnamese fluently, though he has never learned to speak it. And recently, he has begun tackling a challenge with no documentation, roadmap, or troubleshooting guide: learning how to be an uncle.
