About Me

My Story

When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be a YouTuber. I'd watch people play video games all day, and that's all I wanted to do. Eventually, that turned into just wanting to play video games for a living because I didn't like the idea of being in front of a camera. But that interest got me curious about how games were made, which led to an interest in coding. I took a coding class all four years of high school, and I liked it, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it.

I liked the idea of cybersecurity because of hackers in shows, but I didn't seriously think about it as a career until I got to Florida Poly. When I saw how many computer science and software engineering students there were—tons of people wanting to be game developers—it made me question if that's really what I wanted. I didn't like the idea of being a coder, sitting at a desk doing mundane tasks, adding feature after feature, working on one tiny piece of a much larger project.

That's what pushed me toward cybersecurity. It's all about puzzles—hacking into systems, figuring out ways to stop people from getting in, thinking about how to get around those measures. Attack vectors, networking, all of it. It's way more interesting than just writing code for someone else's project. I love the decision I made.

Outside of tech, I was a competitive swimmer in high school. I got my lifeguard certification at 16 and spent years teaching kids and adults how to swim as a Water Safety Instructor. I worked my way up to Head Lifeguard at Florida Poly and also worked for the City of Lakeland. Swimming taught me discipline and how to push myself, and lifeguarding taught me leadership and how to handle emergencies—skills that have been useful even in engineering work.

I like building things to solve problems I see. When I noticed the City of Lakeland was still using a dry erase board for lifeguard schedules, I built a web app to replace it. When I got worried about carpal tunnel from sitting at a computer all day, I built my own ergonomic split keyboard and got into 3D printing to make the case. If something's broken or could be better, I'd rather figure out how to fix it myself than just accept it.

Right now, I'm working as an Embedded Cybersecurity Engineer at EveryPeer. I build embedded agents, work on WebRTC-based peer discovery systems, and contribute to backend stuff for network security. I'm ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity and currently studying for my Network+ certification.

A friend of mine, Joey, introduced me to Zettelkasten—basically a knowledge management system for organizing notes. I really like how it works. Instead of trying to write everything about a subject all at once, you just make small, atomic notes and link them together. For example, algebra shows up in both physics and calculus. Without Zettelkasten, I'd have to write the same algebra information in both the physics and calculus notes. With Zettelkasten, I just make one note on algebra and link to it from both. It's way more efficient, and it makes it easier to see how concepts connect.

Education

Certifications

Experience

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