Biography, the long version you didn't ask for

My interest in computers started at an early age. The earliest I can remember is playing flash games on Lego.com using my Dad's Sony Vaio Laptop running Windows XP. One day my dad brought home a Playstation 2, and that was one of the best days ever. I loved that console, Kingdom Hearts, Star Wars Battlefront, the LEGO Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Indiana Jones games... such good times. Some years later that old Vaio became obsolete and was replaced by a much burlier, bulkier (bloated) Windows Vista machine. Kids today do not remember the age of the 8-9lb Toshiba satellite.

Around this time I had transitioned to PC gaming, I remember long skype calls with friends playing Halo 2 SWAT or mining for diamonds in Minecraft beta. At any rate, I don't remember when and I don't really remember why but I decided to take that old vaio and install linux, specifically Ubuntu 12.04 after that I was pretty hooked on computers. I wanted to know more about them, how they worked, what you could do with them besides just playing games. It was also around this time that YouTube channels concerning tech, specifically hardware were kind of taking off, Linus Tech Tips, NCIX were entering the golden age of DIY PC Gaming. I was obsessed with obtaining a gaming computer, or more specifically the components to *assemble* a gaming computer.

My chance would finally come when one Christmas my wonderful parents gifted me with the components from my Newegg wishlist. I kept it pretty modest for the times, a 14th gen Intel Core i5. It even came with a promotional rubik's cube with stickers for Intel Core products, Speed Demon memory etc. And the crown jewel was an ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GT620 with a whole 1GB of video memory!!! As the years went on I slowly upgraded, more RAM (16 whole GB), and most importantly a better GPU an EVGA GTX 650Ti 2GB. It was still pretty budget but it did what I needed it to do for the time. As a consequence of this PC obsession I pretty much always knew I wanted to be some kind of computer engineer person. My dream and stated goal 'after high school' was that I wanted to go to college, study Electrical Engineering, and work at Intel or Nvidia. I remember wanting and envisioning this for myself so badly. I think growing up in rural Oregon with limited access to socialization outside of school or sports, led me to seek community online, and therefore take more of an interest in computers. I think that isolation is why I gravitated so hard towards video games too, in the rainy Oregon Winters there wasn't anything better than getting cozy with a blanket and losing myself in the game world.

So I finally graduated high school, and moved on to college. I had enrolled at Oregon State University as an Electrical & Computer Engineering Major. For some reason beyond basic HTML and CSS I had never actually done any programming up to this point, despite my interest in computers these classes at OSU would be my first forays into solving problems with code. I have to admit that I struggled initially because of this. The newfound freedom and necessity of managing my own time, combined with the fact that up to this point school had come extremely easily to me, requiring minimal effort in studying or self practice meant that I had to cope with working hard and experiencing cognitive friction. I honestly think what did the most for my life trajectory was getting a job with the Core Networking team on campus. They ran the networking infrastructure for the entire University and it was such an amazing experience getting literally hands on with network switches, routers, patching ethernet, and fiber. I got to land Hewlett Packard A5500s, rolling around with a laptop with a serial port, a couple pairs of single speed fiber, and some QSFPs to rack, patch, and program real network infra. This was the point where my computing interests extended beyond the personal consumer and into the data center. So despite my addiction to Dota 2, I did learn a lot in school!

My dream to work for an iconic tech company came true when I landed an internship at Intel in February of my senior year. It was a full time remote role and I was so stoked! My previous experience in the datacenter and with linux came in clutch. As part of that team I met some very wonderful people, got to work with new tools and learn a ton! I remember getting my offer call and immediately dropping my classes for the term! School could wait, it was time to work baby! I say 'new' technologies but we used Jenkins which today feels dated. This was truly my introduction to the 'DevOps' world and methodologies. I think it really helped that the team I joined (and Intel generally) was very baremetal. This was a rare opportunity I think to get access to high performance compute without abstractions. I was addicted. I wanted greater scale and more responisiblity.

I did however, have a degree to finish afterall, I stayed at Intel part-time while I finished out my fith year at Oregon State. During this time, lockdown effects were slowly being lifted, I was 21 and finally making some money. I transitioned from a broke college student to a confident capital 'A' Adult. I think being in lockdown and the impending finality of my college experience led to me trying to branch out and really embrace what Corvallis had to offer me. I bought a bike and started riding the local trails and commuting between class, my apartment downtown, the bars, and the local climbing gym which I had also recently joined. Rock climbing, specifically bouldering turned out to be another awesome outlet for getting some sense of community and freedom in a crazy time. At the same time I took extra appreciationg for the academic experience, I found myself taking so much joy in going to class, being on campus again, it felt so special and I didn't waste a moment. I look back on the countless long nights in the lab or my friend's garage, working on our Electrical Engineering Capstone with fondness and nostalgia. In some ways this moment felt like the beginning of my life? If that makes sense, obviously your birth is the beginning but it was at this point that I feel I really started to solidify my identity.

So eventually, I graduate, I get a full time gig on a different team at Intel, working on their Engineering Compute team. Here I got to get really hands on with infrastructure at scale. I attribute a lot of my recent success in the experiences I had in this role. I truly grew at Intel. This role enabled me to build up my systems thinking skills, and linux accumen. I also got the chance to do a little development here and there. While I was working, I did make sure to keep up-to-date with the latest and greatest. Towards the end of my second year I had started thinking that I wanted something new, to grow new skills and expand my horizons. I built a kubernetes homelab which taught me a lot about technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, and ArgoCD. I had identified these as the gaps I wanted to fill in my professional experience within the DevOps world.

I took this new experience with me to a new role at Centric Software. I was super excited to join a team that had a software product that was externally customer facing. I learned a lot here too and started with a lot of confidence in my abilities. I got *really* hands on with Terraform and Kubernetes administration. It was awesome. I quickly identified a need for an internal platform for the DevOps team and I built it. I converted all the manual scripts and jenkins pipelining into a more 'modern' GitOps backed Argo Workflows platform. My favorite project was helping deploy Centric AI Studio. Working with awesome developers to help bring their product to market was the highlight of my experience and a culmination of the skills I'd built up to this point.

Having learned so much, I realized that I had learned all that I could, and once again set upon the task of branching out for new opportunities. This new opportunity came in the form of colleague reaching out about a startup that he worked at, Lila Sciences. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning had quickly become an interest of mine. I'd built a RAG app and other projects that built the curiosity and desire to do more in the space, so this move made a lot of sense.

That's the story so far, I'm excited for the future but mostly I'm happy to be enjoying the journey.