About Me

When I started college, I had two parents and my best friend's dad who were all accountants—one being a partner at one of the Big Four accounting firms. I knew if I graduated with my Masters in Accounting and passed the CPA, I'd easily have a job lined up.

It wasn't until my second year in accounting when I took an advanced Excel course that everything changed. We had one assignment where we had to create macros and automate Excel using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). That was the first time I didn't hate a homework assignment. I went above and beyond, messing around and pushing it to its limits. I realized you actually can enjoy assignments, and I was probably in the wrong degree.

I decided to take some computer science classes the following semester alongside accounting to see how I felt. Not soon into that semester, I met my soon-to-be wife—who was also in computer science—and everything just felt like it was put in place for a reason. Assignments became fun. I'd complete them as soon as they came out, constantly refactoring and improving performance.

It was by far the best decision I ever made to throw away 1+ years of classes (only a few generals transferred, unfortunately). To this day, I love my job and my decision to become a software engineer. I love that my wife also shares the same passion for software engineering.

Once I found my passion, I excelled in all my courses. I became a Teaching Assistant as soon as I could and pushed myself to graduate in 4 years instead of 5—all while working nearly full time.

I tried to be the TA that didn't just give answers or dismiss code because it wasn't written like the solution. I truly understood each student's approach so I could quickly assess and guide them to success. This was noticed by the professor I taught with, which led to my nomination as Retention TA.

I'm diving deep into AI and machine learning—exploring how to incorporate AI-driven features into applications. The future is undeniably AI-driven, and I want to be at the forefront of building these experiences.

I self-host several AI models on my dedicated Proxmox server equipped with an NVIDIA RTX 3090, which allows me to run just about any model locally. Adding the AI chatbot to this website and building the AI-powered receipt parser have been incredibly fun projects—I can't wait to see what else I create with it.