How It Started

I started with electronics when I was 11-12 years old when I combined remotes, hobby rockets, and RC cars to race RC on my street. While in middle school, I learned how to solder and made my own FM/AM radio from a hobby parts kit. Over the years, I experimented with computers and software modding, which led to me developing a deeper interest in software and computers.

The Turning Point

In 2005, I found a joke website that had a strange button on the webpage. After clicking on the button, I spent the next 20 minutes going through pop-up dialogue boxes that displayed progressively worse insults about me. This got me interested in web application development and coding, so I started taking coding classes in college before I had to drop out for work in 2007.

In 2018, I started studying for the Juniper JNCIA (CCNA equivalent). I went back to school in May 2021 at Gateway Technical College, eventually earning my Associate of Applied Science Cybersecurity Specialist and TestOut Cyber Defense Pro certification. Throughout the course of my schooling, I built a reasonable home lab with limited equipment (this was during the worst of the Covid shortages), but developed competency in multiple areas including Linux administration, virtualization (Docker, Kubernetes, LXC, and VMs), switch and hardware firewall configuration, and AI/ML automation.

The Next Level

After the factory I worked at shut down, I was hired as a NOC Technician for a local satellite ISP/MSP managing satellite-based networks and telecommunications. After the end of that role, I worked as a contractor at a new data center as a Data Center Technician racking and stacking servers, switches, DAS servers, network patch panels, MOR devices, and network infrastructure. Since that contract ended, I have been looking for a new role with either a local company not contracted with that data center, a remote role, or potentially in manufacturing again.

Since discovering the usefulness of integrating AI into existing workflows, as a hobby and way to keep my skills in coding and software design fresh, I began developing and integrating AI/ML operations into my workflows, security testing, and offloading several workflows entirely to local AI-powered automations through scripting. As new tools and AI projects are released, I occasional investigate and use some, but heavily rely on and prefer automations that I specifically have to code/program over low-code/no-code options like Make or N8N.

In addition to my more technical skills, I have developed experience and skills in marketing and design, focusing mainly on visual marketing materials or internal documentation. I have several years of experience making presentations for marketing and technical fields, SOP and training documentation, communication templates, and image editing or creation (krita, gimp, drawio, AI generation).

Projects

At my current stage, I have been fine-tuning a small number of local models specifically on my knowledge vaults and codebases, developing single-task tools to use in my workflows, and have recently started working on a web development project that will largely be used for an ARG. The ARG will require a number of the skills and techniques I learned from my schooling and time spent on PicoCTF, including picture and audio file steganography, cryptography and cryptanalysis, knowledge of various hashing or encryption methods, and various literature analyses.

I have been experimenting with open-source enterprise software, specifically comprehensive ERP solutions (frappe/ERPNext), CMS/CRM platforms, Inventory Pipelines, and API integration to automate and simplify operations for small to medium businesses. While the freelance market is hard to break into and difficult to maintain, I have been building out a full ERP deployment for a small bakery startup, as well as marketing my services on freelancing platforms for general IT solutions, project-based programming and coding, and security or AI systems management.