I started off out of high school working as an electrician at a large electrical company, Reddy Electric. Here I was split between Industrial level electrical and Data work. TO be honest, I don't particularly enjoy working in large factories or large new construction projects -- it feels too cookie-cutter and somewhat lifeless.

After ~ a year in this position, I found a small local company that specialized in working with older homes and more rural environments -- like farms, water treatment, even local nature sanctuaries like Arc of Appalachia. I loved this position, and over time took over estimation, invoicing, and pretty much whatever needed done.

Gradually, I found myself board with what electrical had to offer, and I was finally in a position to where I could support myself as I went to school. That was the biggest obstacle -- even after securing scholarships, being able to fund myself as I went to college was nearly impossible for me immediately out of high school -- but thankfully advances in remote learning and my early career success made it possible for me to make the jump.

As I started college, I worked out an agreement with my employer to work full-time as needed, but with the flexibility to allow me to prioritize my classes. After ~ three years, I graduated with a bachelor's in computer science and was met with what is the extremely saturated and difficult to enter software engineering field. I eventually found myseld in a technical role at a laser & pinstamp manufacturer.

At my new role, I traveled across much of the US alone working on our laser systems, often of which were integrated into some assembly process. Although I didn't love that I came full circle back to an industrial environment, I openly admitted to my employer that I saw this as a temporary step towards a job more closely aligned with my degree. Fast forwards ~ a year and my persistence of communicating with our software department and in general doing my best to support and collaborate with our engineering department paid off.

Now we are at present day, where I work as a software engineer at a local company just south of Columbus, Ohio. My position combines a mix of working hands-on with our embedded systems and developing software for these systems -- honestly a perfect mix of the skills I had acquired in the electrical field and throughout college.

More specifically, I work with QT Create and Visual Studio to create the user interface, as well as the lower-level code for communuicating with stepper/servo boards and other I/O like I2C and GPIO. Although I've used Qt Quick and other Qt UI tools, I often have to work with old tools like Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) due to some of our older Softwares

For specifics of my software skillset, click here.