I'm a Software Engineer with a passion for game development and teaching.

• 😄 Pronouns: He/Him
• 💬 Ask me about: Art that I own! For the first time in my life I live near a popular convention center and I am taking complete advantage. I buy a lot of nerdy posters, paintings, portraits, I even have a few 3D pieces. I take a photoshoot after a convention and love sharing them with people
• ⚡ Fun fact: I have a world record run for Antz Extreme Racing (GBA) I stole this record to create a rivalry with a friend. I'll die with this record

If your looking for a more standard overview of my work history, checkout my LinkedIn or my personal website. Heck if you're lookin to read dozens of people talking about how I'm the best, look no further then my tutoring page

My first experience teaching computer science was with iD Tech, first as a summer instructor, and then a lead instrutor the following year. I taught campers from 13-18 in python, java, and c++. Not to brag, but I was dang darn good at instructing. So good in fact that I decided to continue into the school year. I signed up as a remote instructor with Wyzant my sophmore year, tutoring highschool and college students for the next 5 years.

If I could create proper stablility through tutoring, I'd still be teaching. Most of my students were early year college students that had a python coarse they needed help surviving 😆 It was an interesting challenge to help students who had no interest in software break down problems in the way we need to for computer science. It felt very similar to when your first learning algebra and all of a sudden your math has word problems in it. I had many students who felt endlessly frustrated because the same thing had happened with their computers. Going from using word and power point to C++ and python. And TOO OFTEN I had students who could understand the purpose and function of variables, conditions, loops, but having no idea when or where to use it to solve an assignment. I charged over 60 an hour for most of my time teaching so I always recommended going to professors and TA's but most students told me they get 15 minutes a week for questions and help. I had one student going through nursing school and their compsci professor brought them to tears over a homework assignment 😭

My other students simply needed additional explanation. My busiest subject by leagues was Data Structures I & II. Most professors completely fail to give any connection between how things work and WHY we use them. Combined with poorly written assignments and people will pay seamingly anything for someone to paitently guide them through an assignment. I miss helping students get to those major aha moments.

I'm bad at this! 🤣 I've really only just begun my dev journey and I hit plenty of roadbumps. At first I played around with several game engines, GameMaker Studio, then Godot, then Unity, then Unity did their really crummy licenscing, and back to Godot for version 4 😵 Each time needing to relearn simple aspects that I had forgotten and or needed to do a bit differently. I've often struggled with making sure rigidbody works properly with its object family. To be honest since these are passion projects I often follow that passion where ever it goes. I often think of a feature I want to try and replicate, and once I get a bare bones MVP I move onto a new feature.

I am officially enjoying Godot and have worked out general flows for making and importing models/textures, have simple Node Trees for basic ojects. I'm hoping to start pushing more polished final projects 🤙

Yup, I do big important company work too. I am a software engineer, and my most recent work was with EBSCO Information Services. A "leading provider of research databases, e-journal and e-package subscription management, book collection development and acquisition management, and a major provider of library technology, e-books, and clinical decision solutions for universities, colleges, hospitals, corporations, government, K12 schools, and public libraries worldwide." 😮‍💨. I worked on one of the teams focusing on authentication and authorization 🔐. Massive props and applause to my team and the devs who hired me. I knew a bare MINIMUM in this field, but they assured me they were looking to mentor new devs into this role. AND THEY ACTUALLY DID. We've all heard and experienced the horrifically classic scenario of your company "training" new hires, only to throw them into the lurch with no support. I actually had some amazing timing earning this position because it was right when their entire framework was going to update from RefArch 1.0 to 1.5. So my first 6 months involved replicating already existing microservices, learning how to use the new monitoring tools and such along with Senior Devs, and executing "the flip" from using the old services to the new services once configurations were in place. It was a HUGE amount of work and coordination, and honestly looking back, I was very proud that we managed it all considering my team was 2 Senior Devs and then 3 BRAND NEW Junior Devs. While a lot of the learning involved EBSCO's internal tool set (microservice cookie cutters, pipeline infrastructure, in-house testing tools, in-house management tools, etc.), I did learn a significant amount about our external services too (AWS, Auth0, Grafana, Sumo logic).

Since the great migration, our teams worked towards refactoring our main authentication service into more focused services. Since we serviced so many different types of clients, we had to maintain many different types of authentication, so we were separating flows into new services. A recent feature I helped break down that I was particularly proud of was our work to build an in-house tool to replace an external service we were paying A LOT of money for. The external service simply wasn't built for the scale and purpose of our company, so we opted to create an internal service to store and manage our resource servers, scopes, roles, clients, and their configurations. Even though my team should have been given MORE TIME on this effort (the deadline to have everything functioning was the time we'd have to sign another yearly contract), we still managed to design the database, plan out the service with our twin team, develop the service, export and import all the relevant data we had with the external service, and then finally implement the new service. Keeping in mind that this was some of the most critical data to allow ANYONE (devs across the company and clients across the world) to successfully log in. Aaaaand we did it, which I definitely harped on during my next performance review.