About Me

Introduction

I don't come from a traditional tech background, even though I've spent most of my free time at a PC since I was a kid. I've always been interested in coding and web development as a hobby, but only in recent years did I find the confidence to try to make it my career.

Past Work

Much of my work history has been in transportation, trucking vegetables from local growers all over New England, ice cream around New York and New Jersey, and trees and stone in Pennsylvania.

While driving for a lubricants company, I had the opportunity to expand my skillset in their manufacturing plant. I learned to be a chemical operator, lab technician, and production supervisor, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the process from beginning to end. I'm naturally curious and enjoy getting to know the ins and outs of a system.

When I decided on a career change to coding, I was delighted to find that many of the skills that helped me to succeed in those past jobs were just as helpful when programming. The demand when driving of maintaining extended periods of focus certainly helps when coding. The results-driven practicality picked up from problem solving at the lubricants plant also comes in handy when architecting a programming project.

Current Focus

Like a lot of people making similar career shifts to tech, I initially focused on learning frontend web technologies. It's been quite a challenge, given the wide scope and rapid changes in this domain, but I enjoy it.

Lately, I've been spending more time doing backend coding. Starting with Java, I eventually found myself learning C#/.NET. These days, my preferred stack is a .NET backend and SvelteKit frontend, typically reaching for PostgreSQL as the database. While some projects I've opted to deploy to so-called serverless services, I've recently taken to administrating my own servers and deploying projects on those.

It's abundantly clear to me by now that there's unlimited space to grow in this field. As integral as technology has become to modern life, I hope to bring the same safety-mindedness required when driving a truck and operating industrial equipment to my programming work.

Hobbies

Outside of tech and other work, I've played guitar on-and-off since childhood, both electric on a custom 8-string, and acoustic on a nylon-string flamenco guitar. I watch a lot of movies, and it's rare that I won't enjoy one at least a little bit, but have a preference for those in black & white with long runtimes. I'd like to return to learning Chinese, which was my course of study in college, and have fond memories of my Classical Chinese and calligraphy classes.