You know, it’s always a difficult thing to write about yourself. Especially here - I’ve probably restarted this blerb 3 or 4 times now. What should I say? I don’t want this to seem like a resume, or a LinkedIn page, I feel that it should be more personal than that. The approach that seems best to me is just to tell you a bit about how I arrived at the position that I’m in now.

I’ve always been interested in technology, especially computers. I remember the day that my parents bought a new family desktop computer and installed it in our kitchen. It was a thing of mystery and curiosity to me. On that computer I would play my first video games: Webkinz, Facebook’s Farmville, Runescape, and eventually Minecraft.

Minecraft ended up having a huge influence on me. By wanting to host a server for my friends I ended up learning networking basics like DHCP, ip reservations, and port-forwarding. As well as an introduction to the client-server relationship, with an idea in a multiplayer setting what the local client vs server was responsible for. This ended up stemming into my real first programming experiences, following youtube guides to create Java plugins for these servers, allowing me to create my own functionalities.

Eventually I opened up servers that were public facing, which pushed me in the direction to learn web development to create a space for users to connect on. Back then, this meant learning HTML/CSS/JQuery/SQL. It also meant that I couldn’t just host the server on my machine anymore - I needed something dedicated. From this I learned about DNS records, linux VPS hosting, the unix terminal baics cd, ls, sh, grep, terminal operators, tmux, vim, htop, and the ssh connection process. Circa ~2013.

Around this time I started highschool, which I was fortunate enough to have offer some basic computer science & networking classes. Through this I completed my Cisco Networking Academy Level 1 certification, learning the deeper intricacies of what comprosises a network and their available configurations. These courses also helped me solidify the correct way to structure a programming project and refined my understanding of OOP.

I also got into building computers, which is still a huge passion of mine to this day. I built my computer, my friends computers, and jerry-rigged together old components to build personal linux boxes. Using these I experimented with Domain Controllers, NAS, Plex, Apache, Docker, and home automation.

After highschool I pursued & obtained an Honors Bachelors of Computer Science from the University of Ottawa. I learned lots and found a passion for many of the sub-generes such as data structures & algorithms, cryptology, computer vision, and micro-controllers. During this time I was fortunate to land a developer position with the school itself working on some of its website. Through this I was introduced to CI/CD, cloud computing, Git, Node, Angular, and distributed systems. I also frequented the school’s makerspace, tinkering with 3D-printing and laser cutting. Eventually combinding these with micro-controllers like the Arduino to make small robotics.

Nowadays I work at a tech startup as a solutions analyst. I design & implement cloud solutions primarily related to automation, data engineering, and data analytics. My go to platform is Microsoft Azure & DevOps, but have some deployments in AWS as well. In my personal time I continue to learn about my hobbies. Right now I’m interested in parallelism & concurrency, physics engines, Ai, home automation, trying my best to stay up-to-date with common JavaScript frameworks, and of course - gaming.