I have always had a natural inclination toward technology since I was an adolescent, starting with my family's very first PC ‐ a Dell Dimensions XPS tower with a 56k modem (high speed internet access at the time). I was so intrigued by it, I sought other like-minded tech enthusiasts like myself in order to learn how to take it apart and put it back together again. Eventually, this sparked my interest in designing and building custom-made computers with specifically chosen components so that I could overclock the processor and GPU to score high benchmark scores. This hobby of mine carried well into high school and college, such that once I graduated and was looking for employment, I gravitated toward positions in the IT field.

Despite not having any formal education in technology, I impressed my first manager with my skills in troubleshooting computer-related issues that I got my first job in tech as an IT technician at an SEO company called 29´ Prime in Irvine, California. It was a fast, yet heavy, introduction to the world of enterprise IT technology and I learned so much that it solidified my foundation in everything IT, including networking. This experience landed me my next position at a private aviation company next to John Wayne Airport in Irvine called JetSuite Inc., which was the best experience I had working IT, mainly because of the other "crew members" there, whom I had the pleasure of working with (the CEO of the company, Alex Wilcox, who was also a contributing founder of JetBlue prior to starting JetSuite, made it a company-wide requirement to refer to the people who worked at JetSuite as "crew members" and never as "workers", so I hope he reads this one day and knows that I didn't forget that de facto rule!). Not only was it an exciting cross-section of business to be involved in (aviation plus IT), it included some amazing perks, such as free travel for work-related business on private jet planes flying out of private hangars to locations all across California plus Las Vegas, Nevada. I had my first taste of coding when I was tasked with helping the Flight Operations department send out text message alerts to passengers regarding flight delays (at the time, they were individually texting each passenger, which you can imagine was very time consuming). So I ended up writing a Windows batch script that would prompt the user for the phone number of the passenger and the message they intended to send, and it would send that message to the specified phone number via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

I had my first taste of coding when I was tasked with helping the Flight Operations department send out text message alerts to passengers regarding flight delays...So I ended up writing a Windows batch script that would prompt the user for the phone number of the passenger and the message they intended to send, and it would send that message to the specified phone number via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

Sadly, the company re-located to Dallas, Texas. But this was also around the time that I started to question if I still had the desire to continue working in IT because my passion for the job started to wane. That is when I started looking into computer science and programming as a career. I immediately got in contact with the admissions director of the Master of Computer Science program at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in order to inquire about the pre-requisites required to gain acceptance into the program. With her help, I took all the required courses and eventually was very fortunate to gain admittance. What I loved about this program was that it was for working professionals, so it had a great, supportive career advisory staff, and it was only a year-long, meaning no accruing of large student debt. By the end of it, I learned so much about scientific computing, machine learning, data structures, computer architecture, database design, and networking theory (to name just a few). However, it lacked any class offerings in web development, which I was most interested in learning.

This last desire led me to a coding bootcamp called Learning Fuze in Irvine, upon graduating from UCI. Despite my early skepticisms in regards to the entire coding bootcamp industry as a whole, I was actually quite impressed with the quality of instruction and the level of care afforded to us by the entire staff, especially the career services department. With over 700 hours of critical thinking focused on solving coding challenges and crafting full-stack projects from nothing, I knew I was ready to move on to the next phase of my development as a software developer.