About Me

I call it a late start by today's standards, where ten and eleven year olds are out here writing real applications. Back then in my high school class, I was actually one of the only people doing it at all. I made it work with what I had: an Android phone, Python typed out one finger at a time, the keyboard autocomplete fighting me every other character. It was slow and a little ridiculous. But it was mine, and I kept opening it.

Coming to the U.S. in 2012 was a whole new chapter. No relatives waiting on this side, no safety net, just me figuring out the next thing every day. The familiar piece in all of that was the Python habit on the phone. Picking it back up after the move was easily the easiest part of the whole transition.

Two bachelor's degrees stacked on top of each other at Drexel: Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering. EE for the why-does-this-circuit-actually-work side. Computer Engineering for the how-do-you-make-it-do-something-useful side. I never picked which one mattered to me more, so I did both and built projects in the overlap.

Drexel's co-op program threw me into three completely different jobs. One was Unity, building small games and finally seeing what it feels like to ship something interactive. One was Python, sitting with enterprise data and turning spreadsheets into answers nobody had asked for in the format nobody wanted. The third was .NET (Framework first, then .NET Core), writing internal tools that no one outside the company would ever see. Three jobs in eighteen months. I left each one already curious about what the next one was going to feel like.

By the end of college and into my first real job, I was writing C# all day, in domains that had nothing to do with each other. I worked full-stack the whole time: frontend, backend, the CI/CD pipeline, the production environment, all of it. Owning every layer of my own projects taught me a lot, and after a few years of that I was honestly an expert in the .NET stack. That was actually the problem. The work started to feel routine because I already knew how each new project was going to shape up. New domain, same instincts. I was getting better at .NET without learning much I hadn't already seen.

I went looking for something less comfortable, and ended up in Go. Smaller language, weirder community, fewer training wheels. I never really went back. The part that actually stuck wasn't the language itself. It was a small lesson I keep using since: when something stops stretching me, I leave it sooner than I used to.

This is where Go went from a side curiosity to the actual tool I worked in every day. From 2023 through 2025 I was a solution and development architect on a project to modernize a 20+ year old website into a microservices system. About half of the work was architect-side: designing how the Go APIs fit together, planning infrastructure, networking, security. The other half was sleeves rolled up, actually building what I'd designed. It was the first time my day job pushed me as hard as my side projects did.

Then AI happened. People keep telling me that AI gives them their time back. UNFORTUNATELY, that has not been my experience. Two subscriptions later (OpenAI and Anthropic, in case you're keeping score), I just learn faster, which means I have more things I want to try, which means I sleep less, which means I wake up earlier, which means I turn on my PC and immediately start poking at whatever idea I abandoned the night before. I am, as it turns out, a nerd. :P

Getting the Claude Certified Architect Foundations certificate on May 18, 2026 was exciting because it did not feel like an ending. It felt like a door opening. The AI work I had been chasing suddenly had a wider map: architecture, agents, context, tools, safety, and future systems I have not built yet. I am going to keep learning, because this feels like another starting line.