§ 01
Inspiration
Early Inspiration & Digital Roots
Long before I wrote my first line of production code, my fascination with technology was sparked in front of a massive, beige CRT monitor. My grandfather was a tech enthusiast who always had the latest gear delivered in those iconic, cow-spotted Gateway 2000 boxes.
One of my earliest, most vivid memories is watching him pop a brand-new CD-ROM into the drive and load up Myst. Looking at the surreal, pre-rendered landscapes and complex puzzles, I was completely transfixed. Sensing my curiosity, my grandfather made me a deal:
Once you learn how to read, I'll teach you how to use the computer.
That was all the motivation I needed. Driven by the sheer desire to unlock that machine, I was reading before my fourth birthday.
The First Sandbox: 2000s Web Design
As I grew up, that passive curiosity naturally evolved into hands-on experimentation. By the early 2000s, I hit the ultimate millennial right of passage: custom MySpace profiles.
While most users were content using basic generators to change their profile music, I wanted complete control over the layout. I started tearing apart raw HTML and inline CSS, learning through trial and error how to manipulate backgrounds, float tables, and customize fonts, not even realizing that I was coding.
It was a chaotic, unpolished playground, but it taught me a fundamental truth that still guides my work today: the internet is a canvas, and code is the tool that lets you build whatever you can imagine. What started as a child's quest to solve puzzle games became the foundation for a career in software engineering.
§ 02
Career
I grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, and later attended Duquesne University in Pittsburgh as a Physics and Math major with every intention of becoming a teacher. That changed my first semester when I took a mandatory C++ course and absolutely fell in love with programming. Driven by that newfound enthusiasm, I pivoted into a triple major, adding a Computer Science degree alongside physics and math, blending a lifelong curiosity for technology with formal engineering foundations.
From Supercomputers to Software
My academic path remained deeply computational. The summer before my senior year, I conducted research at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, exploring how to use CUDA—which was brand new at the time—to perform Fast Fourier Transforms. This work led to a fellowship at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville in the Materials Science & Engineering graduate program.
There, I spent two years utilizing some of the world's fastest supercomputers to run molecular dynamics simulations studying the thermodynamics of alloys. During this time, I realized I genuinely enjoyed the computational problem-solving and software development more than the physical science itself. I chose to graduate with my Master’s degree and commit fully to software engineering as a career.
Scaling Engineering Foundations
I found my footing at Optricity as their first in-house engineer. Our flagship product was a complex Java desktop application designed to help companies optimize warehouse distribution using custom rules and constraints. Coming from a scientific computing background, I quickly mastered the ropes of enterprise software engineering on the fly. Over five and a half years, I scaled with the company to become Director of Technology, building their first dedicated engineering team and helping transform a sub-20-person company into a household name in the warehousing industry.
Driven to learn from a broader pool of veteran engineers, I later transitioned to BlueMark, a custom merchandise platform for enterprise clients like DoorDash and Uber. After 11 months, a sudden industry pivot resulted in a department-wide layoff—but the connections I made there proved invaluable. Former colleagues recruited me to HourWork to spearhead a massive, top-to-bottom product rebuild, migrating a legacy Java Spring Boot backend into a modern, scalable architecture. I successfully launched the rebuild and executed a complete user migration before the broader tech sector contraction of late 2023 impacted my role.
The Next Chapter
Following the 2023 downturn, I chose to lean into a unique challenge: entering the front lines of consultative sales and commercial operations. Stepping away from the keyboard allowed me to master high-stakes negotiation, client psychology, and market strategy—skills that a terminal alone can't teach.
Yet, my core identity has always been that of a builder. Throughout this chapter, I've kept my technical edge razor-sharp by building modern web apps, exploring frameworks I hadn't used previously, and diving into optimizing my workflow with AI agents. Today, I'm ready to bring this rare combination of battle-tested engineering leadership, deep technical roots, and deep insight into various commercial industries back to a dedicated software engineering team.
§ 03
Interests
Digital Currents
When I am coding purely for myself, I gravitate toward the foundational layers of a codebase. To me, debugging and deep-dive refactoring aren't chores—they are the absolute best ways to truly understand the architecture of an application or a complex database schema. I have a natural bias toward developer experience; building automation pipelines, optimizing CI/CD workflows, and scripting tools that make the local dev environment smoother are things I am constantly turning over in the back of my mind.
Right now, my main technical focus is expanding my toolkit with frameworks and tools I haven't used before and bridging the gap into AI engineering. My current evening pet project is a custom Pokémon GO team builder. While it started as a sandbox to map game data, my long-term goal is to integrate ML models to dynamically recommend hyper-optimized teams tailored to fluid meta-shifts, special leagues, and solo raid counters.
It is a fun, full-circle evolution for me. My grandfather, who spurred my technological interests, asked me daily if I had beaten Pokémon Red after I got it, and I finally did the day he passed away in May 1999. Building specialized tools for that same universe twenty-seven years later keeps that original spark alive.
Analog Channels
When it’s time to completely pull away from the screen, I lean into a mix of heavy iron, nostalgia, and creative outlets.
Iron & Aesthetics
A long-time non-competitive bodybuilder. When I lived in Southern California, my daily sanctuary was the legendary Venice Gold's Gym (the absolute mecca of the sport), working under a dedicated coach. Music is the fuel for those sessions—usually a split between heavy synthwave/retrowave rhythms and an unironic collection of mid-2000s emo. Growing up as a gay kid in a small town and Catholic school system, that era of teen angst music was the perfect soundtrack, and it still hits just right during a heavy lifting set. Lifting outside in the early morning as the sky is transitioning from black to purple to pink and the ocean breeze is my absolute happy place.
The Kitchen
I grew up in a traditional Italian family in Steubenville, Ohio (the exact same hometown as Dean Martin—my grandfather insists they were in the Boy Scouts together). That upbringing taught me how to cook properly. My absolute specialties are slow-simmered, homemade pasta sauces and scratch-made cinnamon rolls.
The Great Indoors & Outdoors
To completely unwind, I hang out with my 13-year-old pug, Stella, read sci-fi, or lose myself in classic JRPGs. When I lived on the west coast, I fell in love with nature, spending my evenings catching sunsets at Venice Beach, hiking mountain trails, or driving out to the pitch-black skies of Joshua Tree to capture deep-space astrophotography.