About Me
Military Background
I served five years in the Marine Corps, deployed to Iraq, and obtained the rank of Sergeant before retiring. As a Sergeant in the Marine Corps, I developed strong leadership abilities, which have proved essential for leading and managing teams in the civilian sector. Serving in the Marine Corps instilled a strong sense of discipline and work ethic in me, which has contributed to my ability to maintain focus and be productive in hectic highly-technical environments. I also, faced many situations that required conflict resolution skills, which has enabled me to ensure efficacious operations in collaborative environments. My dedication and outstanding performance was recognized, many times, by being awarded with 2 Navy Marine Corps Achievement medals, (NAMs), multiple meritorious commendation, masts, and boards and meritorious promotion.
Contracting Experience
I've worked as an independent contractor for over a decade, and with many clients. Working as an I.T. contractor taught me how to communicate complex topics to individuals that had little to no experience with technology, and has improved my ability to adapt to different technologies, situations, and environments quickly.
Education
During my last two years in the Marine Corps, I started my degree in programming online, but shifted my focus towards my associates in networking after moving back to Texas. While working as a contractor, I obtained my bachelors in Information Systems and Cyber Security. Completing my degree while also working in the field provided me with a multitude of experience in different I.T. disciplines. I have also been able to improve the security of many clients’ data including remediating HIPAA requirements for medical professionals, while also ensuring the privacy of their patients, and customers.
My first venture into
programming
Teaching Experience
Directly after completing my degree, I was able to obtain a position as an Adjunct Profession teaching at the same school due to my impressive performance, and extracurricular work with many of my professors. I taught many programming courses, as well as networking, systems engineering, and security. Teaching at ITT Technical Institute required me to communicate complex concepts effectively to students which further increased the same skill set that I developed in my contracting work. My teaching experience at ITT Technical Institute demonstrates my ability to mentor and coach others, which can be invaluable when training new team members or helping colleagues improve their skills in future development positions.
Game Development
I have been a hobbyist game developer for over 8 years, and after deciding to make it a career, completed a few games, and took many courses on many game development aspects. Working with multiple game engines, and keeping up with changes in the industry has allowed me to improve my skills as a programmer significantly. I have not only made games for fun, but I have actively studied, and taken courses for many aspects of game development including animation, modeling, texturing, particle creation, and constraints for different gaming platforms.
Continued Education
Learning and working with technology has always been a passion of mine, and has been since a very young age. I have become proficient in many different aspects of technology even if not directly related to work. Some areas of interest have been image manipulation, video and audio editing. When learning new skills, I always ensure that I can apply them effectively to real world situations. Every task I undertake, even in my free time, is a personal challenge, and I aim to excel in it as a commitment to myself and the communities that surround me.
Machine Learning and Data Science
Machine learning, and data science have always been of interest to me as well. I’ve had the opportunity to develop NLP automation programs to help sort clients file shares (MSDSs, Invoices, etc..) and I’m currently developing and tweaking the non-stop flow of ideas for “LLM applications” using tools like Langchain, and libraries like Gorilla, or integrating LLMs into other development systems. I’ve performed some recent experiments fine-tuning small models with specialized masking processes using QLORA. I’ve also been creating llm automation tools to parse and vectorize web pages to perform research, and combined it with nlp and image recognition to reduce some of the need for api calls to large llms to obtain faster generation, and get through chains with multiple steps faster.