About Me

My goals with this site:

I have a couple of goals for this site. The first and most obvious is to tell a bit about myself, a portfolio, so to speak. The second is to write some stuff about what I'm learning about, both for my memory and on the off chance that someone finds something I worked with and it helps them.

My Experience with Tech:

As a kid, I played some video games, both console and PC. I wouldn't consider my exposure at that point to be above average for my generation. My first time programming was as a result of my middle school teacher recommending Khan Academy's 'Hour of Code'. They don't offer that program anymore, but I think that it was a basic JavaScript environment where you could draw shapes and make animations. The project 'p5.js' reminds me a lot of hour of code.

From there, I was fortunate to be able to enroll in some tech and programming classes in high school. The first class was in Visual Basic, which I don't have a lot of recollection of. The classes then moved on to Java, where we made games in Greenfoot. I also was able to do a TA class where I worked on a website to allow students to order from the coffee shop online. That project did not wind up getting off the ground, but I did learn a large amount about working on my own, doing research, and reading documentation.

After graduating High School in 2018, I went to college at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. At UMKC, the program starts students off with Python for CS101 and then moves on to C++ in CS201. After 201, the program branches out and students use languages that the professors choose. As a result of this, I had exposure to C, C++, C#, Java, Python, and some other less popular languages. I graduated with a Bachelor's in Computer Science in 2021.

Another fortunate event for me was starting an Internship with Yellow Freight in May of 2020 despite all of the shifts that COVID caused. I worked at Yellow from 2020-2023. I was hired as a full-time developer in 2021. My first two years of work were focused on application administration and automation. The automation work was done in PowerShell. My last year at Yellow was focused almost entirely on API development in Java Spring for a new third-party route planning application.

You can see my tech-related stuff here.

My Experience with Astronomy:

Like many other kids, I thought space was pretty cool. At one point I got one of those department store telescopes for Christmas. I looked at the moon through it a couple of times, but that's about it.

Luckily my high school had an astronomy class that met after school. On cloudy nights we did normal classroom instruction then on clear nights we would go out and do visual observing. My astronomy teacher was great and was the main reason I got into astronomy as a hobby. He wound up giving me an 8-inch mirror and a secondary, which I'm still very grateful for. I used that to build my first telescope. My teacher also told me about ASKC which I joined that year and have been a member since.

I didn't do much astronomy during my college years due to time constraints but was able to get back into it when I graduated.

Since then, I've become more active in ASKC and astronomy. I bought a second, smaller 4.5-inch telescope. The 8-inch is a bit of work to move around so having a smaller scope has made choosing to go out and observe much easier. I'm working on a couple of, hopefully, useful guides at the moment that I'm pretty excited about. Stay tuned for more to come.

You can see my astronomy-related stuff here.

Contact Me

I'd rather not put my email out for the spammers to grab, but you can contact me on Discord or LinkedIn. If you are in ASKC my contact info is in the member directory.