About

I began my journey into software development during my freshman year of high school. I was the programmer for one of my school’s VEX robotics teams, 6403B, where I started with a language called robotc. I had no idea how software development worked, so my first year was a lot of learning, most of it being self-taught. During this year, the team I was competing with ended up qualifying for the world championship. We had a lot of fun, but I knew I had to learn a lot more since the team captain and other members were graduating. The next year VEX introduced new hardware and software; programmers could now write plain C/C++ using a library called PROS to interface with the hardware. My love for software development grew rapidly from this point. During my junior year, our team qualified for worlds again and placed 2nd in the Ohio state tournament. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic stopped worlds from happening during my junior and senior years of high school.

Team 6403B standing behind their robot with the middle person holding a states tournament finalists poster, 6 people left to right — My robotics team and I standing around our robot, holding our finalists banner

Team 6403B standing with their allianced team, 11 people from left to right — My team and I standing with our alliance team from the finals matches

After high school graduation, I decided to major in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Toledo. This degree aligned closely with my time in robotics, since it includes components of software development and electrical engineering. The university required that all engineering students complete 3 full internships to graduate, the first of which I needed to start in the spring semester of 2023. I ended up landing an internship with a manufacturing company named The McAlear Group. The development team at this company did most of its work on web applications, which I had no experience with up until this point. It was difficult transitioning from embedded development to web applications, but I was determined to learn everything I could. During my semester-long intership, 2 other interns and I created an internal tool using Vue.js and C# to manage company data stored in a SQL database. After my initial intership ended, the company continued to employ another intern and me. I worked 20 hours part-time during school semesters and worked full-time for the rest of my interships. During this time, I deployed and maintained many production applications, some on-premises and others hosted in Azure. Once I graduated, I was offered a Software Engineering position at The McAlear Group, which I happily accepted.

Singing my first job offer while sitting in my bosses office — Singing my first job offer at The McAlear Group

My friend Daniel Walbolt, who also interned at the McAlear Group, and I began working on a passion project called Net Pantry in October 2023. The name and concept originated from an app idea he had envisioned years earlier but never realized. We decided to build a web application using DigitalOcean as our VPS provider, Cloudflare for our domain, Nginx to proxy requests, and Docker to deploy our APIs. Knowing early on that it had real potential, we decided to adopt Net Pantry as our senior design project. Throughout college, we balanced development with classes and work, contributing when we could. Our senior year gave us the most time to work on the project since we were given a dedicated class period. We pushed hard and arrived at a working beta by the senior design expo. Development continues to this day and you can visit the website here.

Two students smiling at their project booth for Net Pantry at the University of Toledo’s senior design expo — Daniel and I at our project booth during the senior design expo

Group of coworkers and boss standing behind project booth for Net Pantry at the University of Toledo’s senior design expo — My coworkers and boss showed up to our see our senior design project