About

Today

I'm a Bay Area front-end engineer with a focus on secure application development. Alongside my Information Technology studies, I maintain an active home lab where I experiment with security tools and self-hosted services. My approach combines practical security implementation with modern development practices. Aside from coding, I enjoy building custom computers, bowling, and shooting photography.

Learning

Completing high school at 16 opened a world of possibilities, and my curiosity led me to explore them all. Rather than following a traditional path, I explored through various disciplines – from growing Instagram accounts to achieve over 4 million followers collectively, to running web development startups, to serving as a creative director at a marketing agency. Each venture was a new puzzle to solve, a new system to understand.

These experiences, while diverse, shared a common similarity: the need to understand complex systems and find creative solutions to challenging problems. Whether designing brand identities, managing large-scale social media campaigns, or building web applications, I was constantly analyzing systems for opportunities for improvement. This problem-solving mindset eventually led me back to my true passion, technology, but now focused with a broader perspective on how systems can be both functional and secure.

Childhood

My journey into technology began at age 6 with a Compaq Presario 5000 – a gift from my grandmother that would change my future. While it started with Space Cadet Pinball and KidPix, my curiosity quickly evolved into something deeper. I found myself fascinated by the complex system internals, spending hours discovering ways around parental controls and security measures. This natural inclination toward finding creative solutions led me to uncover various exploits in library and school computer systems – not for malicious purposes, but driven by pure curiosity and a desire to understand how things worked.

That same curiosity drove me into web development and programming, where I spent countless lunch breaks coding and exploring emerging technologies like cryptocurrency. Today, I'm channeling that lifelong passion for understanding system internals and security into a career in application security, combining my development experience with my inherent drive to uncover and understand system vulnerabilities.