My work experience began as a 16 year old IT guy at an elementary school district.

I stuck with this well through college and learned a lot about support work as well as collaborating with "clients" (teachers) to find the best solutions for their use cases.

Run-of-the-mill 4-year bachelors degree in computer science from CSU Bakersfield. I Learned about programming, math, databases, etc.

My senior project was essentially "Duolingo but for ASL" using an AI model trained to detect the letters A through E from a webcam.

I was responsible for setting up the app, database, and several mini-games. We called it "Handango".

I'm sure I'd be embarrassed of most of that code if I took a look at it now; although I was proud of it at the time!

We didn't end up taking this project anywhere after graduation, so this hasn't been developed further.

I'm being brief about my college experience, but it was very valuable to me because it exposed me to different technologies, methodologies, languages, as well as collaboration. Coming out of it I felt very prepared to enter the job market.

My previous work and education experience carried over well to my first full-time, and current, job at Fox Dealer.

There is a lot to say about my first professional experience here so I'll try to condense it.

I have accomplished a lot that I'm proud of:

• Optimized our CMS dashboard and cron job performance
• Refactored a lot of outdated legacy code
• Created a JSON template system for our inventory data exports to reduce the needed dev time for new exports
• Permanently fixed many inventory data bugs and anomolies causing repeat issues for our clients
• Successfully integrated our system with 3 new OEM program partnerships and 4 new inventory data sources

And I have been able to refine many of my skills and develop some new ones:

• Collaboration with clients, third parties, and engineers
• Improved problem solving abilities
• AWS experience with EC2, Amplify, and Lamdba

Most of my day-to-day work involves handling support tickets, fixing bugs within our CMS and inventory systems, working on new features in our roadmap, and creating documentation for use across multiple teams. We are always getting new feature requests and compliance requirements from our partnered OEMs (Toyota, Nissan, GM Canada, etc), so I'm familiar with looking through documentation and designing ways to appropriately fit it within our system.

Over these 3+ years I've proven myself to be a reliable problem solver and strong communicator; becoming a go-to-guy within the company for backend systems inquiries.