A love for software, I've worked in a wide variety of fields in my near decade of work experience. Web development in my college years, automating and infrastructure at startups, and high computation software at a fortune 50 company. On my free time, I doodle around with homelab and VPS servers to see what I can make. I'm always on the lookout for new and old technologies, to see how the world is changing, and how our tools are changing for the better. I enjoy philosophy, and read quite a bit of it. I also do amateur nature photography, with a focus on landscape and bird photography. If I'm not doing programming and photography, I'm doing my best to get through my music and video game backlog. I'm not sure where my life will lead me next, but I try to embrace it as best as I can!
My most ambitious move yet, I joined this fortune 50 company at a time that needed modernization of their infrastructure. I work on insurance finance data, first in auto insurance, then in fire (home) insurance. Using apache spark software on in-house servers, eventually migrating to AWS Elastic Map-Reduce (EMR). Occasionally dabbling in infrastructure for Gitlab and AWS via CI/CD and Terraform, respectively. Eventually, I took the helm of a team of 10+ developers, and worked with other leads in the department for the technical and business needs. With the start of the pandemic, our team went fully remote, and we continued to keep steady in productivity and delivery for deadlines. Very proud of the two teams I've had the pleasure to work with!
A startup with over 10 years of work in the domain name field, I joined Intelium to work in data analytics and other minor, flexible roles that shaped my time there. Worked closely with many folks over a wide variety of needs. I migrated & crunched over 8 terabytes of domain name data to a new database for customers of estibot.com - a domain name appraisal service with the years of experience to prove its credibility. I also worked on minor programs - such as chrome extensions for estibot.com, and for the public good, occasional physical server rack installations and software provisioning, and web scraping that added gigabytes to our daily crunch of terabytes of data. I had a very thrilling experience, learning something new every day.
In my second year of college, I joined a new department of web developers at my university's housing. We used a LAMP-like stack, and worked in both back-end and frontend. I implemented some security for the existing login system we used. I wrote a variety of forms, package tracking for residence, and housing check-in and check-out. I also wrote inventory management service interfaces for housing IT. These forms were used by over five thousand students at any given year. It was some of the most fulfilling work I ever did as a novice programmer.
My four years of university was some of the hardest working years of my life. Balancing school life with work, my schedule was packed while commuting in my later years. I studied software engineering methodologies, databases, networking, security (practical and theory), object oriented programming, operating systems, algorithms, and much more. Also did some volunteer teaching assistant work, and a semester of research with Professor Theys. Go Flames!
As the years pass, I have acquired a variety of skills in programming. I also speak fluent Polish, and have proficient understanding and reading comprehension of German (not an active speaker). I try to keep this updated as time passes.
Unforntunately, a lot of my work is behind closed doors via NDA clauses, or no longer around. Luckily, my photography is not!
Please enjoy some of the photography that I've done. You can find the latest on my instagram!
This little fella was taken in California by my dad. He and I share photographs with one another!
My mother has a bird feeder for the cardinals that come by in her home in the Chicago suburbs. Got a good picture of one chomping away!
This one was taken during gold hour, which gave this incredible, long term exposure shot.
This one is taken in my backyard one very cold winter night, a little after gold hour, in Bloomington, Illinois.