Answering the classic question: "so tell me a little about yourself"... This page will tell you more about me, my goals, and why and how I made this website.
Education: University of Notre Dame
Major: Computer Science in the College of Engineering
Minor: Engineering Corporate Practice
Graduated: May 2024
About Me
I live a fairly active lifestyle and love to learn. I enjoy just about any form of exercise: weight-lifting, yoga, running, swimming, and hiking. In addition to staying active I enjoy reading, normally several books at a time. I’m also learning the guitar and the bass guitar. I’m an avid dog lover; I have four dogs back home in Virginia. I’m a big fan of the great outdoors, cooking, and coffee shops. So that’s what I keep myself busy with when I’m not busy with work.
About this Website
It’s been a goal of mine to make a personal website for a while now. Resumes nowadays are fairly cookie-cutter. I wanted this website to be a showcase of all of my skills, past projects, and jobs. I also wanted to show potential employers a bit more of my personality as it’s hard to come across on a simple one page resume.
This website was made with a JavaScript library called Preact. During my Senior Fall (2023) semester, I took Modern Web Development, and I took advantage of new content from this class and some extra office hours with my teacher to make the website you see now. This past summer, I found that I really like iOS Development, and this past semester I found that I really like Web Development, too. For this website I used Preact as opposed to React because I liked how Preact is a bit closer to HTML-style code which I'm more familiar with.
After working at Apple in Summer 2023, I found myself excited to learn more about their web development process. One of my roommates this summer was working on one of the apple.com teams and I was always curious about it. If you look at the Apple AirPods Pro Page you'll find something that truly excited me about Apple -- not only do they make great technology products, they utilize their mastery in technology (in this case, their mastery of web development) to showcase their products. The scrolling images along with the expanding text on this website are inspired by what I've been intrigued by on the Apple website.
I wanted this website to be easy to navigate, to have aesthetically pleasing scrolling animations, and to be an accurate reflection of myself.
About my Career
I chose a career in software engineering/development because of my passion for problem-solving and constant learning. I'm currently a Software Engineer at GEICO, specializing in both frontend and backend web development. I'm part of the Technology Development Program (TDP), which I really enjoy because it allows me to take courses that enhance my skills and career while also collaborating with my dynamic, tech-driven team.
As for past work experience, I’ve interned as a Data Scientist at CACI and as a Software Developer at Apple. Of these two disciplines, I found I really enjoy software development. Even at CACI my favorite aspect of my job was the more software engineer aspect of Data Science--designing and optimizing solutions. Then at Apple I had a great mentor and team that really helped me dig into the realm of Software Engineering and iOS Development.
If you'd like to chat, please head over to the Contact Me section and reach out.
