About Me

A Long-winded Bio

Presenting the breadth of my professional skills is a bit complicated... If you're looking at this because you found my music, or are trying to hire an engineer, or are a colleague at one of my teaching gigs; you're probably not much interested in the rest. To expedite your reading, here are some quick links to the various sections:

• Education
• Music
• Code

Education

My formal education is primarily in music. I attended an arts highschool on a music track, and I hold a Bachelor of Music degree. My education is, however, rigerous. Before attending arts highschool, I was enrolled in the full-time International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma program. I also studied for a year at North Hennepin Community College, where I intended to complete an AS in Computer Science.

I am a nearly entirely self-taught programmer. Which is a bit of a hard sell if you're reading this as a potential employer (though unlikely). However, rest assured that my accomplishments show that I am very capable when it comes to working on real-world products.

I consider self-teaching to be the primary way I've gained proficiency in my work across all departments. Outside of my career pursuits, I consider myself to be an active and avid learner of many things both trivial and practical. I strongly believe in the interconnectedness of our domain knowledge, and I am much more flexible, versatile, and agile because of mine.

Music

I grew up playing guitar, primarily. I still consider myself proficient in it, and occasionally I do teach guitar lessons. I'm not opposed to playing the instrument, but after 10 or 15 years it feels much less exciting to continue the same level of rigerous practice from my teen years. These days, I consider myself primarily a pianist who focuses on classical music.

I once had a string of lessons with Marina Albero, who told me “I'm not a jazz musician, that's just what they call me”. And I really like that, because calling myself a classical musician is limits the versatility of my playing. It's likely you will hear me as a classical musician, because that's my current pursuit.

But my musicianship is much broader than classical music; contemporary, improvisation, blues, jazz, ragtime... At Cornish College of the Arts I delved into the world of experimental sounds, noise, and various esoteric realizations of sound. I've dabbled in live-coding, synthesizing work that combines my programming and music skills. I am also an infrequent composer and songwriter!

While my current goals and practice put me in the category of “classical pianist”, nothing happens in a vacuum. All of these influences contribute to my musicking.

Code

I have the most experience developing websites and web applications. The language I've mosted used in production code-bases is Typescript. But as these things go, and hopefully as I've established, I'm curious and wandering and I use many different tools and languages that are either more appropriate for certain tasks, or ones I find intriguing.

I've built video games in C# with Unity, and I teach middle schoolers to build their own games using GDScript in Godot. I've built APIs using C# .NET, Java with the Spring framework. I built websites with Flask and Django. I've used a dozen Javascript frameworks; JQuery, Meteor, Gatsby, Next, Vue...

I've used industry standard tools like a slew of AWS services, Postgres, Docker. I've written and automated deployment operations using Github Actions, Jenkins. I've advocated for and written automated test suites, practiced test-driven development. I've delivered code confidently, and run a cost-benefit analysis when taking on technical debt. I've integrated Google Firebase and Stripe to create a system to help manage my students' payments.

Just as with music, you'd probably not consider me a specialist. But the resume I submit and the narrow 10-second window of reading it gets (if it does get past the ATS) demands that I present as one. But this is my website, so whatever; I can do what I want. I'm curious, and passionate about creating things, and sometimes those things are virtual products that live on computers. That requires me to have a wide breadth of familiarity, and a healthy dose of adaptibility.