About Me
I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. I first began trying to code when I was 14 years old. However, I had difficulty learning on my own and my high school did not have the resources to provide programming courses. In high school I also had a hard time deciding what to major in, since I wanted to go to college for STEM but grew more and more weary of physics and chemistry. In the end, I decided to try CS in the hopes that I would thrive in a classroom environment that I never had access to before. Sure enough, it all worked out for the best!
I am now a recent grad from the University of Minnesota, with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Statistics. In my final few semesters of school, I decided to focus my upper division courses on data-driven computing, which focuses on disciplines such as data science, big data, and GIS. Throughout the early stages of my career, I have mostly gained experience in backend development. I really enjoy the process of designing, implementing, and analyzing performant systems.
Work Experience
IDeaS - A SAS Company
Associate Application Developer: June 2021 - Present
- "IDeaS, a SAS company, is the world’s leading provider of revenue management software and services. With over 30 years of expertise, IDeaS drives better revenue for more than 18,000 clients in 140 countries."
- Java, Spring Boot, Amazon Web Services, MongoDB/Redis, RabbitMQ, Terraform, Javascript, Docker, Jenkins, Gerrit, OpenAPI, Atlassian Products (Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira)
New York City Cyber Command
Data Engineer Intern: February - April 2021
- Supported the development, assessment, and optimization of the agency's ETL pipeline, handling security logs from 20+ external sources from over 100 municipal agencies across NYC.
- Implemented a dashboard for the SRE Team, pulling, aggregating, and presenting analytics from GCP in order to communicate the health of the data pipeline to executives and the agency more broadly.
- Debugged batch processing modules, allowing more consistent data to be sent to the data warehouse, enabling analysts to ensure integrity of city systems.
- Assisted data engineers with performing code review, QA testing, and deployment of performance improvements across the pipeline via CI/CD process.
- Python, Javascript, Flask, Java, Terraform, Jenkins, Google Cloud Platform, Git, Jira
Mzuzah Charitable
Web Design Intern: November 2020 - April 2021
- Redesigned and streamlined company website using Squarespace, adding custom HTML/CSS and Javascript as needed in order to meet the company's specific needs.
- Assisted web design team in wireframing, prototyping, and creating new content for the overhauled website, as well as optimizing for mobile users, the company's main medium of engagement.
- Implemented search engine optimizations and transformed the donation process to increase the organization's footprint and revenue.
Passions
Hobbies
How I spend my free time
Since graduating from school, I've been trying to pick up where I left off with learning Spanish. I am definitely rusty and it is hard to find the time for it, but I am making a conscious effort to expose myself to the language through things like TV shows and music. Also on my bucket list is to learn how to draw. I've been looking for a hobby that is less cerebral than what I usually find myself doing, and thought it would be a great creative outlet. Still, a surprising amount of technique to learn.
Music Suggestions
My recent listens
Over the past year or so, a lot of the music I have come to enjoy includes the following: Funkadelic, Black Sabbath, St.Vincent, Sufjan Stevens, Beach House, Death Grips, and Grimes. I am also a big fan of live music, and am hoping to develop a website in the near future that helps people discover upcoming shows in their area.
Spotitheta
Continuing with music, late 2020 I decided to begin working on a project to help people quantitatively compare their music tastes. Using Spotify's Web API along with Vue/Express frameworks, calculate a "genre vector" for the user based off their recent listening history, and let them directly see how similar their recent music taste is to any other user that has used the app via cosine similarity, essentially finding the angle between two user genre vectors to determine how similar they are.
In Memoriam
"What is grief if not love persevering"
One of my favorite things to do during the 4 months of warm weather is biking in the city. The following section is dedicated to those who have fallen in pursuit of this summer pastime.
1986 Fuji Sagres: Hit by car (not my fault)
1986 - 7/7/2020
Cheap amazon bike: Stolen (my fault)
5/19/2017 - 8/31/2018
Contact
Currently, the best way to contact me is through LinkedIn.