About Me

Early Years

After enduring 2 years in Roswell attending NMMI, was afforded the opportunity to attend West Point and commissioned in 2010. I spent the first half of my Army career between training units and combat engineering units before wrapping up my last few years in Army Civil Affairs where I had the chance to work alongside USAID within Africa helping sustain aid efforts.

Consulting

While leaving the Army in 2018, I quickly realized I had absolutely no idea how the real world worked and learned my lesson hard when I couldn't even explain the concept of consulting after reading about the concept for several days (I could spit out all the jargon and it would confuse both the person asking and myself). I got incredibly lucky to somehow get an offer with Accenture where it gave me a chance to experience a variety of roles both on the businses side and product side working alongside enginering teams.

Backend Engineering Bootcamp transition

While searching for a career path, I remember always beeing blown away by the engineers as their work screens would always look so foreign no matter how many questions I asked. I had set in my mind that I'd never be able to truly understand unless I found a way in the same profession myself. Looking back now, I now realize that I made some pretty ignorant assumptions about a lot of things. Either way, this motivated me to consoult with a few folks who got into the swe field from college and those who went through the bootcamps. Skipping all the boring details, I finally started in 2021 and wrapped up to begin my time working in an development capacity.

time in engineering

I started my first 2 years in platform/infrastructure teams. While interesting, I wanted to first build out a breadth of experiences before committing to a domain in this field. I took interest in picking up a systems programming language, which was actually much harder than I expected. Trying to do due diligence on a best path seemed impossible as there were neverending comparisons and one-ups between cpp, go, rust that took me down to too many rabbit holes.

I ended up going with rust due to the higher barrier to entry and while the language choice was probably insignificant, the language forced me to learn a lot of the basic principles of computer science that I never got a chance to learn through a standard cs degree. I now look back at how silly it all was to take so much time in being careful with my choices and that at its core, I thrive most in simply having hard problems to tackle, regardless of the stack.