bio

From my earliest days, I had a love and infatuation for desktop computers.

I loved navigating the menus in DOS.

I loved designing banners in Print Shop and printing them on my family's dot matrix printer, wasting hundreds of perforated pages at my parents' expense. I can still hear the screeching (of the printer).

Eventually I fell in love with videogames. Doom, Duke Nukem, Warcraft, Starcraft, Quake, Ultima Online.

Naturally I began building my own PCs. I was always amazed at the intricacy of mobos, soundcards, and graphics cards. I thought to myself, "there is no way humans designed this."

My love for gaming did not help my grades in school. UO was significantly more important to me.

College was not really an option. During my senior year of high school, I attended a vocational program where I became a certified EMT. I spent one summer working as an EMT, primarily running contracts for the county coroner's office picking up dead bodies for $15/hr.

Realizing quickly I needed to change jobs, I decided to follow my older brother's footsteps and joined the Marine Corps.

I enlisted into the infantry, as I wanted the "purest" Marine Corps experience.

After my first deployment, I went on to become a school-trained Marine Corps Scout Sniper (0317). I finished my 4-year enlistment as a team leader for a scout sniper team supporting an infantry battalion.

Leaving the Marine Corps and returning to civilian life was strange.

I fell in love with gardening. It inspired me to learn about the biochemistry of plants and to begin taking courses at the local community college.

My father, who spent most of his career as an electronics technician, decided to give me a crash course on electronics. He gave me a high-level overview of resistors, caps, inductors, diodes, and Ohm's law.

I went on to discover Arduino and quickly used it to automate my garden.

At this point, I had been bit by the bug. I had come full circle, returning to my childhood roots in electronics and computing.

Six years later, I graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering (I had a lot of catching up to do at community college, particularly in maths).

For the next ten years, I would work in HW and FW design roles across various companies -- startups, private, public.

I fell in love with PCB design. It is a beautiful combination of physics, art, and the unforgiving reality of nature that so many prefer to escape.

The most notable highlight of my career was working at Tesla, where I was one of the first design EEs to work on Optimus, the humanoid robot project. I spent two years on Optimus, designing hardware for battery electronics, motor controllers, and power distribution, before deciding to leave for family reasons.

Now, I am still learning and building more than ever when I'm not out exploring with my wife and three sons.