Life
According to my Tinder profile, my personality can be summed up as electric guitar and Dungeons & Dragons. The real me, however, has much more depth. For example, I recently took up bass fishing and am eager to get a fishing boat. (If you have a boat, let's be friends! Please, the fish hardly ever come towards the shore.)
I attended three different colleges to earn my degree. My journey started at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, where I worked as a Helpdesk technician. It was there that I learned what kind of work environment and culture I wanted after graduation: collaborative, team-based, and filled with lots of fun nerds.
Sadly, my time at Edgewood was cut short after a year when I moved to California and attended Diablo Valley Community College to temporarily pursue my passion for music—until I quickly realized that computer science was far more likely to pay the bills.
Fast forward a few years, through three semesters of physics, differential equations, linear algebra, a few more physics classes, and a worldwide pandemic, and I was ready to transfer to the University of California, Santa Cruz—a stoner hippie school with an out-of-character renowned computer science department. There, I mastered the arts of backend computer science, such as databases, distributed systems, and computer networking. After earning my Bachelor's in Computer Science, I moved to Seattle to start my journey in the cloud.
Like many modern college graduates, I soon realized that my degree didn’t equate to real-world knowledge, so I immediately began studying for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam and the CompTIA A+ certification.
Thanks to the magic of networking, I landed my first software engineering role with The SpaceLab, where I designed their SQL database and front-facing GraphQL API.