Personal Achievements

Back in High School, after really getting into Logic Grid Puzzles, I got an unexpected but life-changing 99th Percentile, Mathematics score on the Ohio Standardized tests. This led me to get into the Step-Up program, which let to my first tech job at Core.com

That helped me pay for my education, including getting Accepted to Music School after performing Chopin Fantasie Impromptu (recording not mine) in front of the academic panel of professional pianists, while also pursuing my Computer Science Major.

After starting my own businesses, Cleveweb.com and Cleveland Entertainers, I ended up skipping the last year of college and working in the tech field.

After leading teams at Progressive Insurance, I got into Hadoop and Ruby in the startup world before moving to the SF Bay Area to take my first silicon valley job with Lookout.

As a lifelong mentor, I've taken many software engineers under my wing. Two protegés of mine that bring me much pride are Mike Chen (now at Samsung) and Pat Metsch (now at RJ Lee Group), both of whom began their full stack software engineering careers after training with me.

Some other highlights include getting my Kung Fu Black Belt, becoming an evangelist for Functional Programming, and releasing an online multiplayer game called Castle Risk Online.

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Project: Castle Risk Online

Castle Risk Online is an online multiplayer board game with chat, animations, and AI players. It supports social login, mobile, dark mode, and is a blast to play with family and friends.

The game is built with React, with jotai for atomic state management on the frontend, and optimistic state synchronization viaWebSockets, proxied thru a K8s (Kubernetes) ingress controller equipped with Cert Manager to the underlying Express JS servers, which autoscale based on tcp connection rules, and use RxJS for Functional Programming stream processing of game events.

Key Results

Launched fully functional multiplayer game with realtime chat, social login, mobile + desktop support, dark mode
Achieved <200ms latency for real-time game state synchronization across all players
Kubernetes + Skaffold used for cloud-agnostic deployments

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Project: Sullivan Remodels

To increase lead gen for my brother's business, www.sullivanremodels.com, we took it from an old Dreamweaver site to a mobile-first, responsive website made with React and Next.js. This ensured it was optimized for SEO (Search), which we iterated on by testing with GSC (Search).

The system integrates with Jobber for Customer Lifecycle Management and contact automation and featured CI/CD automation with Gitlab to build, tag and push Docker images to Heroku for inexpensive, scalable hosting.

Key Results

300% increase in organic search traffic within 3 months of launch
Reduced bounce rate by 45% through mobile-first responsive design
Automated 80% of customer inquiry workflows via Jobber CRM integration

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Milestone: Kung Fu Black Belt

After 7 years of study at Shaolin Kung Fu Institute I took a two day long test, passed, and received my hard-earned Black Sash.

Exercises included 1000 jumping jacks, 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 5 miles of running, and much more.

Empty Hand Forms included Horse Form, Arrowhand, Lau Gar Fist, Butterfly Palm, and Kung Gi Fuk Fu.

Weapon Forms included broadsword, straightsword, staff, double daggers, 3-section staff and fan.

2-person Forms included Backfist Bottomfist, Staff vs. Spear, Staff vs. Staff, and others.

Sparring included five 1:1 fights, four 1:2 fights, three 1:3 fights and one 1:4 fight back to back over the course of 90 minutes.

Milestone: Accepted to Music School

I performed Chopin Fantasie Impromptu (recording not mine) in front of a panel of professional pianists to gain entry into the Piano Performance major at Cleveland State Unviersity.

I was a mostly self-taught student with some initial classical training in life, so my college piano teacher Dr. Christine Hall had a lot to teach and unteach to get me to the point where I was ready to perform.

From that point on, I had access to the grand piano rooms, which made pursuing the Computer Science degree much more enjoyable!

Milestone: 99th Percentile, Mathematics

I was a bit of a late bloomer, but after really getting into Logic Grid Puzzles I seemed to do much better on standardized tests.

This included the Ohio Standardized Tests for high school kids, where I achieved a 99th percentile in Mathematics. This enabled me to join the step-up program, which I credit with getting me an early start in technology, by placing me at Core.com as a support tech intern, which later became my first tech job.

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