I’m a software developer working at Penn State as a Research and Development Engineer.
I’ve worked on large, legacy code bases, blasted fake moon rocks with a laser, taught training courses, designed electrical circuits, and led new software projects. I’m a Christian who values kindness, love, and preserving psychological safety. I strive to produce excellent work and solve difficult, systemic problems.
I graduated a semester early in December of 2022 with a BSc in Computer Engineering from Penn State. During my undergrad, I joined the Student Space Programs Laboratory where I led a software team for the 2019 NASA BIG Idea Challenge. We successfully wrote code to control a 1064nm YAG laser that blasted fake lunar regolith. Afterwards, I trained new lab members to build and launch micro-controller payloads inside small rockets.
At some point, I also won the 2022 Hack PSU hackathon with some good friends.
Since then, I’ve been working full time at Penn State as a software developer. My most memorable endeavors have been teaching a training course about Docker, building a CI/CD pipeline that reduced release time from 3 days to 1 hour, and developing RESTful API servers. Sometimes I also review cybersecurity requirements, create product road maps, and talk to customers or subcontractors.
Outside of work, I enjoy playing boardgames with my family, hunting and fishing, lifting at the gym, running with my fiancee, and spending time with my friends.
Languages
Instead of assigning poorly defined ranks to each language, I’ve decided to show specific strengths in the languages I’ve worked with. Hopefully this will give you a better idea about my skills.
Please notice, this table includes non-programming languages! Non-programming languages are very important, but no, HTML is not a programming language. HTML a markup language, and it is equally important as any programming language.
| Language(s) | Strengths in this Language | Libraries/Frameworks/Tools I’ve Used |
|---|---|---|
| Python 3 | RESTful APIs, Concurrency (threads, async, multiprocessing), automation, metaprogramming, OOP, testing | pytest, ruff, sphinx, black, Flask, FastAPI + HTTPX + Pydantic, marshmallow, SQL Alchemy, pyserial, matplotlib |
| C/C++ | Concurrency, OOP, basic templates, STL (containers, concurrency, pointers), ABI, PIMPL, testing, packaging | CMake, GNU Autotools, clang-format, Clang, GCC, Doxygen, Boost, POCO, Nlohmann JSON, cJSON, OpenCV, Google Test, Google Protocol Buffers, ZMQ, DBus, Linux + POSIX APIs, Zephyr RTOS |
| Rust | Concurrency (threads + async), OOP/Traits, linking | tokio, mockito |
| Java | Inheritance, interfaces, concurrency, Swing, OpenGL, packaging, Android | Apache NetBeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Android Studio, Ant, Google Cardboard, launch4j |
| HTML5 (and other XML things) | HTML DOM, XHTML, DTDs, HTML-first (progressive enhancement) design, some accessibility | Â |
| JavaScript | Vanilla (no build) JS, functional programming, destructuring, async/Promises, HTML DOM | Â |
| JSX + TypeScript | Basic types and annotations, strict null checking, build process, Dev Ops, package managers | npm, yarn (including berry), tsc, Tauri, React, Material UI, Vue 2, Ember JS (Octane), Axios, Google Blockly, MIDI.JS |
| SQL | Standard SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. |
PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, PG Admin |
| Bash | Control flow, variables, arrays, associative lists, redirection, pipes, set -e and other flags |
Debian package maintainer scripts, shellcheck |
| Regular Expressions | Character Sets, Groupings, Quantifiers. Enough that I can probably figure out your mysterious sed commands. Limited forbidden knowledge about how regex API’s differ in different programming languages. |
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Other Tools
DevOps: Docker, AWS, GitLab, Bamboo, BitBucket, Git, Trivy, SonarQube
Editors: VS Code, vim, nano, sed, cat, less
What I’m Learning Now
I am working towards my AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification, and I’ve taken an interest in Rust and JavaScript.